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REVELATION AND THE IDEAL. 
RELIGION AND MIRACLE. 
THROUGH MAN TO GOD. 
ULTIMATE CONCEPTIONS OF FAITH. 
THE NEW EPOCH FOR FAITH. 
THE WITNESS TO IMMORTALITY IN LITER- 
ATURE, PHILOSOPHY, AND LIFE. 
THE CHRIST OF TO-DAY. 
IMMORTALITY AND THE NEW THEODICY. 
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY 
Boston and New York 



REVELATION AND THE IDEAL 



REVELATION AND THE 
IDEAL 



BY 

GEORGE A. GORDON 

H 
MINISTER OF THE OLD SOUTH CHURCH 

BOSTON 






BOSTON AND NEW YORK 

HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY 

1913 






COPYRIGHT, I913, BY GEORGE A. GORDON 
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 

Published October iqig 



©CI.A357090 



I DEDICATE THIS BOOK TO THOSE 

WHO BELIEVE THAT THE IDEAL 

IS THE SHADOW OF GOD 

IN THE MIND OF MAN 



PKEFACE 

For many years I cherished the audacious dream 
of writing a book on the philosophy of Revela- 
tion. More than ten years of study and reflection 
ended in the conviction that the task I had set 
myself demanded for its accomplishment the un- 
divided devotion of a long life. The task had to 
be abandoned ; I was compelled to allow the 
dream to fade. Something, however, had been 
gained ; what could not be discussed in the form 
of a treatise might be presented in a series of 
visions close to life and warm with serious con- 
cern for the high moral possibilities of man. 
Such is the origin of this book ; it is the second 
choice of its author, not the first. 

I have long felt that the secret of Revelation 
is in the keeping of the Ideal. The ideal is the 
East where, in each new generation, the Eternal 
light breaks in upon our human world. In plain 
words, I am convinced that the greater introduc- 
tions of God to the mind of man are through 
man's greater ideals. Moral idealism and Reve- 
lation are but the concave and the convex of the 
same figure. The Divine thought is sunk in the 
depths of the human soul ; it lives and operates 



viu FEEFACE 

there under the immediate pressure of the Divine 
Presence ; the swift and vivid forms of imagina- 
tion in the course of the ages catch and reflect 
something of that indwelling and mighty plan. 

The profoundest questions in the entire sphere 
of religious interest are these : Does the Eternal 
God speak to man? If so, how? I should like 
to believe that I had not altogether failed in my 
endeavor to answer these great questions. 

George A. Gordon. 

Old South Parsonage, 
Boston, Mass., 
June 3, 1913. 



CONTENTS 

I. What is Revelation ? . . . .1 

II. What is the Ideal? .... 20 

III. The Universal Ideal . . . .36 

IV. The Sense of the Ideal Presence . 51 
V. The Unescapable Ideal . . .66 

VI. Greatness measured by the Ideal . 75 

VII. The Mystic and his Ideal . . .84 

VIII. The Idealist as Pioneer ... 99 

IX. The Militant Idealist . . . .113 

X. The Idealist in the Dreamer . . 131 

XI. The Deliverer and his Ideal . . 145 

XII. The Idealist under Four Aspects . 159 

XIII. The Idealist Fallen .... 176 

XIV. The Idealist as Teacher . . . 189 
XV. The Idealist rejected .... 201 

XVI. The Idealist in Captivity . . 212 

XVII. The Ideal in Youth and Age . . 224 

XVIII. The Ideal in History ... 234 

XIX. The Ideal as the Meaning of Life . 249 

XX. The Moral Ideal in Christ . . 268 

XXI. The Apostolic Ideal .... 278 

XXII. The Ideal of the Patriot . . 293 



X CONTENTS 

XXIII. The Idealist AND THE Ephesian Beasts 309 

XXIV. Personality and the Ideal Grace 325 
XXV. The Redemptive Ideal . . . 339 

XXVI. The Ideal and the Fact . . 360 
XXVII. The Postponed Ideal . . . .361 
XXVIII. The Ideal Evening . . . .371 
XXIX. The Christian Ideal and Endless 

Life 385 

XXX. The Record and the Ideal . . 402 
XXXI. The Kingdom of the Ideal . . 413 



I 



REVELATION AND THE IDEAL 



REVELATION AND THE IDEAL 



WHAT IS REVELATION? 



' The glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. 



2 Cor. IT, 6. 



The greatest religious debate in the nineteenth 
century, I am inchned to think, was that between 
Dean Mansel and Frederick Denison Maurice. 
Mansel contended that God in his utmost being 
coukl not be revealed; that only certain notions 
about Him of a provisional character could be 
given ; that all our thoughts of Him were relative 
to our intellectual weakness ; that the Infinite was 
solely for the Infinite; that for man there could 
be nothing but temporal images of the Eternal 
Goodness. After this manner Dean Mansel wrote 
in his book, '' The Limits of Religious Thought." 
With great learning, much acuteness, and the 
sincerest purpose to do good, Mansel built a 
prison in which he shut in forever our entire 
race, a prison so tremendous that God Himself 
could not enter; only his shadow might creep in 
through its crevices to hallow the inevitable 
gloom. Mansel was met by Maurice in his great 



2i REVELATION AND THE IDEAL 

book, " What is Revelation?" In this volume 
there is more insight into the ways of the Divine 
Mind in dealing with the human spirit than in any 
other in the English tongue ; and still the great- 
est thing in it is the question, What is Reve- 
lation ? 

We must wait a long time for a universally 
satisfactory answer to that question. There must 
first be an adequate history of the greater re- 
ligions of the world in the light and hope of 
which uncounted millions have lived and died. 
There must come, in the second place, a sympa- 
thetic and understanding mind upon this history. 
In the third place, there must be new and pro- 
founder insight into that sublime dialogue be- 
tween God and the soul that constitutes the 
heart of the highest religious experience. Eagle 
intellects are here needed in long succession, 
able from their own elevation and wide circuit 
to survey the earth and scan the heavens, able to 
see the divine sphere in which our human world 
lives and moves, and strong enough to carry the 
great vision down into the centres of man's thought 
and being. The day of the Lord is coming when 
the watchman upon the walls of Zion shall see 
eye to eye. The final glory of the human intel- 
lect will be in just appreciation of the supreme 
treasure of the human heart, its victorious in- 
sight into the meetings of God with men and 



WHAT IS REVELATION ^ 3 

their exchanges in thought and love. Then the 
great promise will be fulfilled : " The sun shall 
be no more thy light by day ; neither for bright- 
ness shall the moon give light unto thee : but the 
Lord shall be unto thee an everlasting light and 
thy God thy glory." 

The word '' revelation " carries its meaning in 
a metaphor, as indeed all words do that bear a 
spiritual import. It means that the veil has been 
removed as from the face of a person. When 
Moses came from communion with God, his face 
shone so that the people were afraid to look upon 
him. When he put the veil over his face, he was 
concealed; when he took off the veil, he was re- 
vealed. In this way the glory of the Lord is 
veiled; it is veiled by human ignorance or per- 
versity. When that veil of ignorance or perver- 
sity is removed, the glory of the Lord is revealed. 
Thus we read as in the text of the glory of God 
in the face of Jesus Christ ; the face of Christ is 
not veiled like that of Moses because human ig- 
norance and perversity are replaced by insight 
and love. It is all so simple and personal. A 
great leader with a veil upon his face represents 
the universe in concealment and mystery; the 
Lord with the veil taken away represents the 
universe in the f uU light of day clear and sure. 
The veil is not of God's manufacture ; it is cre- 
ated by human ignorance and perversity ; it is the 



4 REVELATION AND THE IDEAL 

screen by which man shuts from his vision the 
world of reality, the world of God. 

We may apply the word " revelation " to na- 
ture when nature is understood. Nature embodies 
the will of God ; and wherever the veil of human 
ignorance is lifted from the face of nature, there 
the glory of the Lord is revealed. In the science 
of nature there has been a manifest approach to 
the order of the Divine Mind. When Copernicus 
revealed the true position of the earth and the 
planets to the sun, he tore away a tremendous 
veil from the face of the solar order ; when New- 
ton imified all the worlds in space by the force 
of gravity, he removed another veil ; when Dar- 
win traced the origin of species and the descent 
of man on his physical side, he took away yet 
another veil; when the physicist of to-day is 
breaking up atoms into ions and electrons and 
reducing the elements of matter to force, when he 
is finding a path through material things to the 
dim borderland haunted by spirits, he is strip- 
ping from the countenance of the cosmos the dark 
covering that has for ages made her an enigma 
and a horror. Let science take her way, let her 
remove veil after veil of human ignorance, let her 
push her path toward the great apocalypse of 
the God who lives in the order of his cosmos. 
We see at once how just is the application of the 
word " revelation " to this sphere of progress and 



WHAT IS REVELATION? 5 

how wide is its scope. Whether he knows it or 
not, the scientist depends, for all his powers and 
all his inspirations, upon the Eternal Spirit ; in 
lifting the veil of ignorance from the face of na- 
ture, he is God's prophet ; he stands as a great 
servant in the great process of revelation. 

It is, however, in the sphere of human life that 
we find the deep eternal meaning of revelation. 
What God does for us here is the great, the in- 
finite thing. In regard to the cosmos, His path 
is in the great waters and his footsteps are not 
known. When He enters human life, consumes 
the streams of selfishness and fills their black and 
deserted channels with the river of God which 
is full of water; when He lifts from the heart 
the veil of its ignorance and sin, gives it an orig- 
inal vision of his goodness, a sense of life's worth 
in the presence of its task, and an endless inspir- 
ation for high endeavor and hope ; when in such 
a soul God's character becomes a call for a new 
heaven and a new earth wherein dwelleth right- 
eousness and an assurance to this end, then reve- 
lation stands forth as the sublimest word in human 
speech. Then it means the invasion of our being, 
through our best thoughts and deeds, of the 
Eternal God. 

In our life and behind it is our Maker. How 
can He tell us his name, how can He win us to 
the vision of his character and his purpose for 



6 REVELATION AND THE IDEAL 

man ? Only as He succeeds in removing the dense 
veil of ignorance and sin. Our ignorance of our 
own being, the being of our brother, the moral 
order of society in which we live, the moral struc- 
ture of the history out of which we have come, 
the moral universe in which we are contained 
like the ocean in its bed, and to whose powers we 
are responsive and accountable, — our ignorance 
covers the whole face of our human world and 
conceals from us the God who lives within it and 
beyond it. To the servant of the man of God the 
mountain was bare, untenanted, undefended, at 
the mercy of the embattled enemy ; to the man 
of God himself the mountain was full of horses 
and chariots of fire and his prayer was that his 
vision might become that of his servant. Thus 
it is with human life. To the menial soul it is 
solitary and desolate, open to attack on all sides, 
subject to invasion from woe and death, without 
defense and under sentence of doom; to the 
prophetic mind God is in all the tides of our ex- 
istence and He waits to put forth his greater 
might through the beholding intellect and under- 
standing heart. 

1. We do well to consider Jesus as the great 
Kevealer. The meaning of life lies in human 
personality. Human beings are centres of thought 
and love and character ; they are centres of ra- 
tional and accountable experience ; they are in 



WHAT IS REVELATION? 1 

their inmost depth centres of conscience and will. 
The meaning of the universe is the personality 
of God ; He is the universal, all-pervading con- 
sciousness ; He is the omnipresent Spirit. Who- 
ever would tell us of the soul of God and the 
soul of man must himself be a soul. Jesus the 
supreme human soul gives us the sovereign vis- 
ion of God ; Jesus the perfect man reveals to us 
the actual and the ideal in aU men. The glory 
of God, his love shines in the face of Christ ; the 
ideal for the world of men shines there; there- 
fore, He is revelation in its highest character. 

2. Jesus is the great Revealer because He sets 
God's original order in light. The constitution of 
our human world is the original fact ; revelation 
is secondary. God's order in human life is the 
ultimate reality ; Jesus as Revealer sets this real- 
ity in the sunlight of his teaching and his spirit 
where it can be seen of all men. It is like one 
waiting for the full disclosure of some great 
mountain, a Kinchingunga, for example. Day 
after day, it may be, the eager traveler waits ; 
now the clouds lift and again they settle down, 
here a crag, there an outline, and farther on a 
peak, and once more the view is incomplete ; but 
the hour at length arrives, perhaps at sunset, 
when the clouds are all roUed away, and against 
the warm splendor and infinite peace of evening 
the great mountain stands out in entire, untrou- 



8 BEVELATION AND THE IDEAL 

bled, and unshadowed revelation. It is now re- 
vealed; it has existed from of old; under the 
cloud and without the cloud it is the same ; it 
has forms, features, a character, and a reality of 
its own; the lifting of the veil, the revelation, 
only shows it as it has always been. So with our 
human world ; men are by creation in an order 
of sonhood to God and of brotherhood one to 
another. This vast spiritual structure is hidden 
by the thick and persistent clouds of animal in- 
stinct and interest. Often one would not dream 
that in men there was a divine reality under that 
terrible cloud. But the day of the Lord comes 
to those who wait. Then the clouds lift and 
break and roll away ; and the mountain of the 
Lord, his work from the beginning when the 
morning stars sang together and all the sons of 
God shouted for joy, stands forth indubitable, 
resplendent, divine. 

3. Jesus is the great Kevealer because He 
shows us that man's spirit and man's spirit in 
obedience to the will of God are two different 
orders of life. Man's moral world is one thing; 
that world aware of itself and obedient to the 
heavenly vision is another. The order, the plan 
of man's world, embedded in man's nature, is 
God's original, independent creation ; here reve- 
lation cannot add or alter or take away. The new 
creation comes from God by the will of man, and 



WHAT IS REVELATION? 9 

here revelation becomes the fountain of new life. 
This new creation is no longer the mere design 
of the cathedral ; it is the building rising in ac- 
cordance with the design. Repentance, revolt 
from the domination of brute instincts, the sense 
of the spiritual order in the soul, the clear con- 
sciousness that man cannot live by bread alone, 
that he needs the word of God for his humanity's 
food, and the force of this revealing word in his 
will, are the notes of this new creation. When 
the lost son came to himself, when his vision of 
his father and his father's home set once again 
his original human nature in its true light, then 
he began his return, then he arose and came to 
his father. He began at once the new creation 
in accord with his nature as a human being, and 
the new vision of himself was a creative power. 

4. Jesus is the great Revealer because in Him 
we gain some insight into the ways by which the 
Eternal Mind has in all ages invaded, illumined, 
sustained, and inspired the mind of man. Even 
now men sing as of old : — 

" How precious are thy thoughts unto me, O God! 
How great is the sum of them, 
If I should count them they are more in number than 

the sand : 
When I awal^e I am still with thee." 

Somehow men have been convinced that their 
thoughts at their best have carried in them, as 



» 



10 REVELATION AND THE IDEAL 

clouds carry the sunlight, the thoughts of God. 
A wayfarer lights upon a certain place, tarries 
there all night because the sun was set, takes 
one of the stones of the place, puts it under his 
head for a pillow, and lays himself down in that 
place to sleep. And he dreams of a ladder set on 
the earth and reaching unto heaven and of the 
passage from the mind of God to his spirit of 
the divine purpose of his existence. He awakes 
to find that place a Bethel, a house of God, and 
the earth where he is a sojourner the gate of 
heaven. Somehow this dream has repeated itself 
in unbroken succession in the minds of men, till 
our human world has come to mean Bethel, till 
immensity has become the sanctuary of the Most 
High. This dream of an ancient pilgrim and 
fugitive has fulfilled itself in our Lord's vision 
of the open heaven, in his consciousness that the 
universe is his Father's house. 

5. Jesus is the great Revealer because He en- 
ables men to distinguish between their own 
thoughts, pure and simple, and their thoughts 
with God's thoughts in them. The Sermon on 
the Mount is such a showing ; the builder upon 
sand and the builder upon rock illustrate the 
distinction. In the light of this distinction, we 
read the great past; when we listen to these 
words of a nameless Psalmist, we know that we 
are listening to the word of God : — 



WHAT IS REVELATION? 11 

" The Lord is merciful and gracious, 

Slow to anger and abundant in loving kindness. 

He hath not dealt with us after our sins 

Nor rewarded us after our iniquities ; 
. For as the heavens are high above the earth 

So great is his loving kindness toward them that fear 
him. 

As far as the east is from the west 

So far hath he removed our transgressions from us. 

Like as a father pitieth his children 

So the Lord pitieth them that fear him. 

For he knoweth our frame; 

He remembereth that we are dust." 

Someliow we know that through these thoughts 
of the prophet we attain unto the thoughts of 
our God: "For my thoughts are not your 
thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, saith 
the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than 
the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways 
and my thoughts than your thoughts." Somehow 
religious men have felt that the poet Daniel was 
uttering a principle of universal application when 
he said : — 

" Unless above himself he can 
Erect himself, how poor a thing is man." 

When we consider the sand on the beach, the 
tempest on the great deep, the flower by the way- 
side, the mountain in the background, the lights 
and shadows upon it, the noonday sun shining 
upon it, and the winding silver stream that binds 
it to the sea; when we recognize a father or 
mother, when we look into the soul of a beloved 



12 REVELATION AND THE IDEAL 

friend, in each and all of these instances, we 
know that by our thought we have passed beyond 
our thought into reality, cosmic and human, 
other than our own. When we think of God and 
lift our mind to Him in prayer, we know that 
by our thought we have transcended our thought 
and rest in the thought and presence of God. 

This is the simple and fundamental principle 
of our being. We are everywhere in contact with 
reality other than our own reality ; we pass to 
that reality through our thoughts and in so do- 
ing transcend our thoughts. We seek education, 
that is we seek escape from our own crude mind 
into the mature mind of our race ; we complete 
our poor individual existence in the life of home, 
trade, society, our nation, mankind ; and in the 
same way we seek to perfect our being in God. 
We may be inland seas, but we are inland seas 
with straits that open into the oceans that beat 
round the world, with tides that take our life 
out into the greater life of our kind and that re- 
turn upon us in the fullness and thunder of their 
strength; we may be inland seas, but we are 
open to the Infinite and in our substance, in the 
mist and cloud of our soul, we rise to God and 
from Him we receive continual visitation. 

6. Jesus is the great Kevealer because He 
leads the soul in a vast process of spiritual ex- 
perience. Christian experience is Christian rev- 



WHAT IS REVELATION? 13 

elation ; it is vision, love, obedience, life, light, 
and joy. Christian experience is a new type of 
existence superimposed upon the sensuous and 
animal existence. It is a type of being expressed 
in a great moral movement; while it involves 
comfort, peace, joy, and hope, its heart is set 
upon excellence ; the vision of excellence, the 
pursuit of it, and the expectation of ever closer 
approach to it sets the religious soul on fire. All 
great religion is a cry after worth of existence ; 
possibilities of worth rise before the religious 
soul in enchanting loveliness and grandeur ; to 
compass worth, moral worth of being, is the in- 
most passion of the religious spirit. Augustine 
speaks here, as he so often does, for our deepest 
desire : " Too late have I loved thee, O thou Eter- 
nal beauty." Nothing but rectitude and its divine 
comfort will do in this sphere, nothing but a life 
in the passionate vision of ideal worth, nothing 
but the expectation, ardent and unquenchable, 
of at length attaining this goal. This is the living, 
singing soul of religion ; all else is but the plum- 
age of the bird. 

This sense of the beginnings of a worthf ul ex- 
istence and the hope of greater worth refer them- 
selves to the Infinite soul as inspiration. The re- 
ligious life in the Old Testament and in the New 
is always in the vision of God. He is discovered 
in and through the new experience which He 



14 REVELATION AND THE IDEAL 

has called into existence. God is the immediate 
and infinite other of the man of God : and they 
two went on together. The cry of the Psalmist 
is : " My soul is athirst for God." God's loving 
kindness is better than life. The living reality 
of God is given in religious experience ; the per- 
fection of God becomes the object of adoration 
and unappeasable desire. This sense ef the per- 
sonal soul in fellowship with the soul of God has 
its consummation in the consciousness of our 
Lord : " I and my father are one ; O righteous 
Father, the world hath not known thee, but I have 
known thee. This is life eternal to know thee, the 
only true God, and him whom thou didst send, 
even Jesus Christ." 

Here we have the type for all Christian ex- 
perience. It first accentuates the human person- 
ality ; it does this through the sense of moral 
worthlessness and misery, through the further 
moods of penitence and hope, through the res- 
olution that holds the will in the gales of passion 
like a sheet anchor, through the new moral con- 
sciousness and the notes of struggle, victory, and 
prophetic power in it. The great accentuation of 
the human soul is in and through a genuine re- 
ligious experience. It is the tumult of the sea 
that sets the fog-bell going ; it is the tumult in 
the religious soul that makes it aware of its own 
reality and wild melodious cry. 



WHAT IS BEVELATION? 15 

In and through, this same experience the real- 
ity and the worth of God are given. He is no 
longer merely in the heights or in the depths ; 
He is nigh, even in the spiritual life that He has 
called into existence. His presence is near ; it is 
accentuated through the human conscience and 
heart ; it rises into distinct, awful, infinitely 
adorable, trustworthy personality. Our sin is 
against Him ; our worthlessness is in his pres- 
ence ; we are men of unclean lips and we dwell 
among a people of unclean lips and our eyes 
have seen God, the Lord of Hosts. Our penitence 
carries in it his personality ; He dwells with 
those who are of a contrite heart. His eternal 
perfection sets the goal of aU our love and strug- 
gle and hope ; " Ye shall be perfect even as 
your heavenly Father is perfect." Here indeed 
we see in a mirror darkly, but the image is the 
image of God, and for our hope we have the 
beatific vision, the stage of development when 
we shaU see face to face. As the earth and the 
sun stand revealed and indubitable in the great 
light of to-day as apart and yet together, each 
real and yet in a continuous fellowship, so in the 
illumination of the soul God and man appear as 
true, neither merged in the other, neither the 
shadow of the other, each substantial and dis- 
tinct, and yet both in unbroken and ineffable 
communion. Metaphors multiply as one tries to 



16 REVELATION AND THE IDEAL 

express the new and tremendous emphasis that 
religious experience gives to the reality of the 
soul and the reality and personality, that is, the 
moral intelligence and self -communicating power 
of God. The ocean at peace knows not the struc- 
ture of its bed anywhere ; and while no stress 
could move it over the entire range of its hold 
on the earth, yet, when the tempest has been, 
upon it, and it has been going in all its wild 
power for many days, it might become conscious 
of the order of the shores round which it sweeps 
and here and there gain intimations of its deep 
and awful foundations ; at the same time it 
might dream of the play upon it of heavenly 
powers, the occasional and the everlasting, and 
guess of the universal presence in which it was 
living its free, majestic life. So the soul unmoved 
by religious awe and hope can never know the 
structure of its own being ; and while no stir or 
tumult within it can possibly reveal it entirely to 
itself, while it is too vast for complete self-com- 
prehension, yet, when the pressure of God's in- 
spirations upon it have been long-continued and 
mighty, it surely comes to a sense of its tremen- 
dous moral being ; then it cries, " It is He that 
hath made us and not we ourselves " ; then, too, 
it looks up to find an order of being answering 
to its own, immeasurable, infinite, out of which 
have come its whole character and hope ; then in 



WHAT IS REVELATION? 



17 



the tides and storms of the human spirit the 
presence and the power of God are known. 

The sense of God working in the souls of men, 
and waiting to invade their life through their 
ideals and their loyalty, is the basis of all revela- 
tion. Here comes the prophet sharing the con- 
sciousness of God's presence in the world and 
lifting it through his special endowment and grace 
to transcendent vision and power. A Beethoven 
is a mystery in music, a Shakespeare in poetry, 
a Newton in science, a Kaphael or a Michael An- 
gelo in painting, a Plato or an Aristotle in phi- 
losophy. When common men are set in the pres- 
ence of these masters, they appear like foothills 
in comparison with the supreme summits of some 
sovereign mountain range. In the same way the 
genius, for the consciousness of God's presence 
in our human world, of an Isaiah, a Jeremiah, a 
Psalmist of the first order, a John or a Paul, is 
transcendent. It is a gift so far beyond the pos- 
session of ordinary men as to seem something 
miraculous. It is the special endowment for the 
special function of the prophet. It is an amazing 
gift, and the issue of its use is an amazing bene- 
faction to mankind. We ordinary men should 
know little of the cosmos but for the illustrious 
line of specially endowed men of science ; we 
should never have dreamed of the possibilities of 
expression in music, painting, building, sculpture. 



18 BEVELATION AND THE IDEAL 

and poetry but for the great apostolic succession 
of genius in this line ; nor should we ever have 
risen to the universal outlook but for the high 
service of men of genius in the sphere of thought. 
In the same way we are under an immeasurable 
debt to the monumental minds in religion. They 
have seen what others could not see ; they have 
imparted their vision to the multitude of humble 
men. The succession of the prophets is the high- 
est in history ; through the service of these men 
the fact of God's presence in his world has been 
discovered, taken up into a consciousness of awe 
and joy, carried through the whole sphere of hu- 
man interests as illumination and transfiguration 
and made over into the heritage of the race. Rev- 
elation rests upon the fact of a speaking God ; 
it goes forward in the sense of the prophet as the 
oracle of God to men ; it has never been described 
with more fidelity to truth or with greater maj- 
esty than in these words : " God having of old 
time spoken unto the fathers in the prophets, by 
divers portions and in divers manners, hath at 
the end of these days spoken unto us in his Son.'* 
The word that became vision and character in 
the prophet at length became flesh in Jesus Christ 
and dwelt among men full of grace and truth. The 
greatest religious experience of mankind involves 
the sovereign consciousness of God ; when this 
consciousness is rendered in the greatest words. 



WHAT IS REVELATION 9 19 

it becomes our Bible ; when it is rendered in the 
supreme Teacher, Servant, and Sufferer, it be- 
comes our Saviour. 

In Jesus our Lord we have the great living 
answer to the question, What is revelation ? It 
is his vision of the Eternal Father, his vision of 
the divine order of our human world in Sonhood 
to God and in brotherhood man to man; his 
vision attested by his life and in turn pervading 
that life with ineffable light. The manger in 
Bethlehem is still the East radiant with unutter- 
able promise to our poor world ; Christmas com- 
memorates the beginning of the divine apoca- 
lypse ; the day-spring from on high has greeted 
us and more and more it has become the day- 
star in the world's heart; on them that sit in 
darkness and the shadow of death a great light 
has shined. Now we dare believe that God is 
light and in Him is no darkness at all ; that here 
in his supreme Son we have the light of the world, 
and that whosoever f oUoweth Him shall not walk 
in darkness but shall have the light of life. 



n 

WHAT IS THE IDEAL? 

" Not that I have already obtained, or am already made perfect : but I 
press on, if so be that I may lay hold on that for which also I was laid hold 
on by Christ Jesus." 

PhU. in, 12. 

Here we see the great apostle in eager and joy- 
ous pursuit of the goal and prize of his existence 
as a Christian man. He has become aware that 
Christ's thought for him is the true end of his 
being ; that thought is an infinite thought ; it 
is too vast for him to comprehend. He is not dis- 
couraged on that account ; he is rather exhila- 
rated ; he prepares himself for a great pursuit, 
an endless quest ; he flies in the glowing path of 
his retreating ideal as an eagle might in the fires 
of the setting and vanishing sun. 

In these days, much more than in former times, 
we speak of the ideals of mankind. Among seri- 
ous and vivid thinkers this mode of speech has 
become universal. It is a mode of speech impres- 
sive, significant, and altogether legitimate. Still 
it involves a good deal of vagueness ; and there- 
fore my object now is to introduce, if I may, 
clearness and sureness in the current use, among 
Christian people, of the ideal. 



WHAT IS THE IDEAL ? 21 

I begin with the question, What is an ideal ? 
This is, in the strict use of words, a simple ques- 
tion, and not at all difficult to answer. An ideal 
is a mental picture or image of something that 
one would like to do or to become, to possess or 
to enjoy. A mental picture or image clearly held 
and steadily pursued is in the simplest sense of 
the term an ideal. A hunter beating about for 
game, a mechanic looking for a job, a young 
lawyer dreaming of some great case, a young 
physician beholding in imagination his office 
crowded with patients, a farmer on the way to 
the market with the produce of his farm and 
thinking of the bargains that he may make, the 
young lover building his paradise, the young 
mother picturing the future glory of the infant 
in her arms, the daring moralist forecasting a 
new heaven and a new earth wherein dwelleth 
righteousness; each is an illustration of the 
ideal. Whoever entertains a mental picture or 
image of anything that he would like to do or 
to become, to possess or to enjoy, is, in the origi- 
nal and unqualified meaning of the word, an ideal- 
ist. Such a compound of meanings having been 
packed into the term, there is clearly a call for 
analysis and distinction. 

We think of science as an expression of the 
ideal ; it seeks to attain complete knowledge of 
the cosmos in relation to man. The image of that 



22 REVELATION AND THE IDEAL 

possibility lights up the scientific way and governs 
it. Ten thousand seekers after scientific truth are 
impelled by this vision ; they express their vision 
in more and more amazing results. In the same 
way philosophy aims at the yet grander end of 
finding the meaning of the universe and our hu- 
man life in it. Here again an image guides the 
endeavor of the world. So, too, we judge that 
art is concerned with the ideal ; it is one monu- 
mental expression of the ideal. We are sure that 
the men who wrote the Psalms had a vision, that 
the great poet who wrote the Book of Job had 
a vision. These men steadily pursued their vision 
and tried to embody it in noble words. We are 
sure that the poet Sophocles and the historian 
Thucydides had a vision ; that they steadily pur- 
sued it and tried to express it, the one in his 
drama, the other in his history. We are sure that 
this holds true of all the fine arts. They all are 
preceded by an ideal and by that ideal they are 
governed. Great music is an expression of the 
ideal ; the harmony is sung in the soul before it is 
expressed in musical notation. The Moses and 
the David of Michael Angelo first appeared in the 
sculptor's mind ; the heroic figures in marble an- 
swered the call of the inspired imagination. 
Raphael's great paintings and Titian's and Da 
Vinci's try to catch and embody the vision of 
beauty. It is perfectly obvious that the whole 



WHAT IS THE IDEAL? 23 

circle of art is an utterance, — a monumental 
utterance of the ideal life of tlie race. 

But we must not stop here. These expressions 
of the ideal are but the far-shining summits of 
this mountain of the Lord ; we need to know its 
base on the great breast of our common humanity. 
Therefore, I remark that the total life of man- 
kind is initiated and governed by ideal forces ; that 
nowhere in man is there any pursuit, any achieve- 
ment, any experience, any desire or expectation, 
apart from the presence and might of the ideal. 

Consider, for example, the great warriors of 
the race. Alexander when he invaded Asia fol- 
lowed with steadfast and invincible step a grand 
mental image; Hannibal when he crossed the 
Alps and swept down into Italy followed a mag- 
nificent dream ; Caesar when he waged his war- 
fare with Gaul carried out the campaign in his 
brain, fought out in the actual battle-field the 
image of victory in his imperial imagination ; 
Napoleon when he invaded Russia was one of the 
most audacious, if also one of the most unfortu- 
nate, of idealists. Wellington when he planned 
his Waterloo campaign, and Grant when he drew 
up his scheme for the investment of Vicksburg, 
were working out a mental picture. The march 
of every army since the morning of time has been 
initiated by a mental picture wise or foolish, 
noble or cruel. { 



i: 



24 REVELATION AND THE IDEAL 

We are still far away from the whole truth 
about the ideal. The business of the world follows 
the day-dreams of the race. The light of intelli- 
gence is guiding the industry of mankind. Busi- 
ness is like the ship plunging forward in the 
night, with a great light set in her prow or a 
search-light playing from the captain's bridge il- 
luminating the wild path over which she is steam- 
ing. There is no business done anywhere except 
in response to images, persistent and compelling, 
in the minds of business men. 

We must advance a step beyond this. The fact 
is, all action, good and bad, just and unjust, vir- 
tuous and vicious, is initiated and governed by 
mental pictures. Take, for example, the desire 
for food, A man is hungry ; his hunger is reported 
in the mind, it is figured in the imagination, and 
that imagination presses upon him and upon his 
active powers till the hunger is satisfied. Simi- 
larly a man's desire for wealth or power or knowl- 
edge is thrown up in the intelligence, figured in 
the imagination ; there it remains urging him on- 
ward, controlling his activity in the line of wealth, 
power, knowledge. Upon the level where we now 
stand the drunkard is an idealist. He is in the 
rage of recurrent desire ; that recurrent desire 
gets into the mind, throws up its image there, 
and keeps it there till relief comes. The same 
reasoning holds in the case of the sensualist and 



WHAT IS THE IDEAL? 25 

the wicked person of every description. The de- 
sire that begins in the physical nature is impo- 
tent till it gets into the mind, till it figures itself 
in blazing colors there, till it becomes so inflamed 
and powerful as to dominate action. The bad 
spirit in the Persian faith, the Satan of the epic 
of Job, the devil of the New Testament, the 
Fiend of " Paradise Lost," the Mephistopheles 
of " Faust," the Lucifer of the " Divine Comedy," 
is in each instance a transcendent baleful ideal- 
ist. In each case the heart is the centre of su- 
preme malignity; that malign passion figures 
itself in a vast imagination, controls it to the 
exclusion of all images of good, and turns the 
mighty personality into an unmitigated promoter 
of evil, disaster, and death. 

We enter the region of affection to note the 
operation of the same law. The great cry for 
friendship, the intense and magnificent passion 
of love, the solicitudes and prayers that guard 
the sanctity of home, gain admission to the im- 
agination and live as reflected there. These high 
reflections of enduring and noble wants become 
compelling motives in the life of normal human 
beings. Man is never a creature of mere appetite, 
of mere desire, of mere affection; these are al- 
ways reported in the intellect ; they are flung up 
as banners in the imagination ; and these images 
are the great guiding lights and governing forces 



26 REVELATION AND THE IDEAL 

in the life of mankind. Everywhere on all planes 
of existence, upon all subjects, in all directions, 
the life of man is, in the strictest sense of the 
word, ideal. Images, pictures, guide all depart- 
ments of existence, — science, philosophy, art, 
business, family life, friendship, and the ordinary 
animal wants of men. Jesus we describe as an 
idealist, that is, the will of God stands in inef- 
fable splendor in his imagination and there takes 
the sovereignty of his being. Judas is an ideal- 
ist ; the image of those thirty pieces of silver, 
sordid and revolting, lives in his imagination and 
there drives him to treason and death. I repeat, 
therefore, that the total life of man is, in the 
strictest use of the term, initiated and governed 
by the ideal. 

It has become clear, by this time, that it is 
not enough for a man to be an idealist ; he must 
become a moral idealist ; the emphasis must be 
not only on the noun but also on the adjective. 
And here again our feet stand upon the order of 
our nature. Here is the organic framework of our 
race ; we are a race in relation, member to mem- 
ber, man to man. That system of relations is the 
structure, the organism of our humanity. There 
are lovers all the world over ; there are husbands 
and wives, parents and children, brothers and 
sisters, friends in the great relation of friendship, 
masters and servants in the fellowsl^ip of trade. 



WHAT IS THE IDEAL? 27 

• 

citizens in the mutualism of the state, men in the 
vast communion of humanity. These great or- 
ganic relations in which human beings stand to 
one another, and aU their derivatives,' throw 
their meaning upon the screen of the imagination. 
Consider what all this means. When you ask, 
where does moral obligation begin, what is its 
origin and basis, what shall be the answer? Much 
confusion reigns here where fundamental clear- 
ness is of the most vital moment. Here is the 
great fact of a race in organic, indispensable re- 
lations; here are lovers, members of families, 
friends, masters and servants, citizens, men and 
their kind. These relations we did not make; 
they are made for us and we are pressed into 
them by an overmastering authority. Out of these 
relations come ideals ; these ideals are the mean- 
ings of the relations in which we stand to one 
another reflected in imagination. In these rela- 
tions we are called upon to behave thus and so ; 
then ideals become our obligations in the organic 
structure of our human existence. You look at 
the horizon after the sun has gone down ; you see 
out of that horizon the great planets swimming 
up into full splendor; they are the light and 
beauty of the evening, and if you have work on 
hand out of doors they wiU guide you to your 
task. The human relation is the horizon line, the 
ideal is the great blazing planet, its light and 



28 BEVELATION AND THE IDEAL 

beauty call to the workman and glorify his task. 
These ideals, thus rising like stars out of the rela- 
tions of man with man, assemble in the vast sky of 
the educated imagination ; there they rain down 
upon our actual world their meaning and their 
beauty; in the presence of their splendor we con- 
fess them as our obligations ; these are our divine, 
inescapable debts to our kind; and when these 
forms of imagination have entered the conscience 
and are indorsed there as our obligations, they 
call us as by the authority of God Himself to 
obedience and service. 

This, then, is our second conclusion, that all 
the relations in which human beings stand one 
to another contain a moral meaning; when this 
moral meaning gets into the imagination and 
there unfurls its red banner, and when men live 
in recognition of its beauty and sovereignty, the 
ideal life inseparable from men has risen to 
the moral idealism inseparable from the existence 
of true men. 

This, however, is not the end of our analysis. 
The moral ideal itself needs to be qualified; it 
needs to be lifted into the Christian ideal. Paul 
was an idealist when he was a child, as every 
child is, sometimes good and at other times bad ; 
that is, all his appetites, desires, affections, even 
from infancy, were reported and figured in his in- 
telligence, and became there the guiding forces of 



WHAT IS THE IDEAL ? 29 

his childhood. When he was a child he thought as 
a child. The time came when he could not remain 
a mere idealist ; he rose to a moral idealist. He 
wanted to become a righteous man in all the re- 
lations of his existence, and this profound and 
passionate longing gained access to his imagina- 
tion and thus became his sovereign ruler. There 
came a time when his conception of righteous- 
ness appeared to be wholly inadequate, when his 
power to realize even that inadequate conception 
of the upright life broke down. He was then a 
moral idealist in despair and his cry has rung 
through the ages : " O wretched man that I am, 
who shall deliver me from the body of this 
death?" Later the day arrived when he read the 
organic order of humanity in the light of Jesus 
Christ, when his will rose an inspired will in the 
presence of a new and an immeasurable task. 
Again his shout of victory has been one of the 
great inspirations of militant souls from that day 
to this : " Thanks be to God who giveth us the 
victory through our Lord Jesus Christ." Then 
followed the life that was like the circuit of the 
sun from east to west, now sweeping on through 
cloudless hours and again blazing its way through 
tempests, and at the close of the day stiU contin- 
uing its glorious and endless career. 

Here we must try for a few moments to turn 
this exposition to vital account. We must ask 



30 BEVELATION AND THE IDEAL 

what service the Christian ideal does for the man 
who sincerely holds it. What did Paul get from 
his devotion to the Christian ideal? 

1. First, his ideal gave him a sense of the in- 
finite meaning of life. Plato says that the ideal 
philosopher has an aspiration after truth in its 
wholeness and integrity, he seeks for the vision 
of all time and all existence. And when you read 
that, you say, What a sheer absurdity for any 
human being to think of comprehending truth in 
its absoluteness anywhere; what a preposterous 
thing to hold up as the goal of achievement to any 
mortal the vision of all time and all existence ! 
Yes, but that Platonic ideal gives significance to 
the whole intellectual life of the race, its pursuit 
of truth and its striving for the vision of God. 
That infinite, and in the present moment, impos- 
sible ideal sheds not only a meaning through 
the intellectual toil of mankind, but also gives a 
spirit of dignity to every genuine thinker and every 
genuine truth-seeker. Immanuel Kant says that 
the conscience calls for absolute moral perfection ; 
it issues what he calls the "categorical imperative." 
Again, how completely absurd it seems to demand 
of any man, anywhere, even the best, conformity to 
a standard of absolute excellence ! And yet that 
ideal of the conscience has sobered a whole cen- 
tury, and the more that it is dwelt upon and en- 
tertained the more it sobers the world and gives 



WHAT IS THE IDEAL ? 31 

a kind of sublimity to the struggle of serious 
men and women after an exalted life. In line 
with all this and transcending it, our Lord says : 
"Ye shall be perfect, even as your heavenly 
Father is perfect." Here is an ideal infinite in 
extent and of infinite worth. And if we are to 
call for its realization to-day, there could not 
be put into words a more absurd statement than 
that sublime sentence found in the Sermon on 
the Mount. Yet the holding up of an ideal be- 
fore the world, infinite in extent and infinite 
in worth, gives that significance to our human 
struggle which has been the strength and the 
glory of all the ages of heroic men and women. 

Paul, therefore, gained the sense of the maj- 
esty of his personal life in the presence of the 
infinite ideal which his Master held before him, 
and all his travels, all his sufferings, his whole 
brief sojourn in time became part of an endless 
career, an unclosed opportunity, an infinite task 
in the freedom of the city of God. 

2. Then, too, Paul's ideal kept his life in move- 
ment. Recall Tennyson's "Brook." Is there a 
more beautiful poem in existence than the song 
of the brook that runs to join thebrinaming river ? 
" For men may come, and men may go, but I go 
on forever." And the sea is beyond the brimming 
river. Is there anything in nature more sugges- 
tive of our life when it is true than the gush of 



32 REVELATION AND THE IDEAL 

water out of the heart of the rock on the moun- 
tain-side, its playful, joyful, vigorous rush down 
the mountain-side, its struggle with all sorts of 
obstacles, till it becomes a river, and sweeps on 
and forever on to the sea that is its goal. It is 
this moral ongoing that gives worth to our life, 
the sense that we are bound for the Eternal, and 
childhood, youth, manhood, and old age are but 
the different phases of the river that seeks the 
infinite sea. 

3. Again, Paul's ideal provided for the con- 
tinuous purification of his mind. Our conceptions 
of ourselves are poor things, and when we hold 
ourselves to the mere estimates of to-day, we hold 
ourselves cheap, we insult our humanity. Words- 
worth reminds us that we are greater than we 
know ; and herein is the glory of our being. Our 
nature stretches in all directions, sinks into the 
abysses, rises into the heights ; and so we need 
the expanding conception, the purified ideal. 
You see a child trying to understand its nature 
as its mother does, as its father does, trying to 
climb up to the mature thought of its existence 
out of its childish thought ; you see a student 
struggling with his subject, trying to abandon 
his own poor conception of it and to struggle up 
into the conception held by the accomplished 
teacher and thinker ; and in the same way you 
see the disciple Paul in the presence of his 



WHAT IS THE IDEAL? 33 

Master, trying to understand himself, sure that 
he has not yet understood himself as Christ un- 
derstands him and resolving to pursue that flying 
goal forever. 

Is there anything finer than this daily life in 
the presence of a sovereign Master who knows 
what we do not, who understands the meaning 
of our life as we do not understand it, receiving 
from him every year vaster and sounder thoughts 
and turning upon the fact of human existence a 
purer and a more trustworthy mind? 

4. Finally, Paul was a man of hope because 
of his Christian ideal. He believed that when 
God sets before a man an ideal. He defines for 
him his task as a moral being and assures him 
of the conditions without which the task cannot 
be done. The Greek Plato believed in the im- 
mortality of the soul as surely as any man ever 
believed in it, and he believed in consequence of 
his vision of the endless errand of the human 
mind in the search for truth. Kant, one of the 
great masters of modern wisdom, believed in 
immortality with a great and serious belief be- 
cause he saw that an endless opportunity is indis- 
pensable for an infinite task. Jesus, when he set 
his ideal for his disciples, " Ye shall be perfect 
as your heavenly Father is perfect," provided 
for the realization of that ideal endless life in the 
eternal world. In each instance, the ideal brought 



34 REVELATION AND THE IDEAL 

hope ; in the case of our Lord the ideal filled the 
serious and serving brotherhood of believers with 
a hope that turned night into day. 

In the light of the ideal, our God is seen to 
be the God of hope. Our moral ideals, our Chris- 
tian ideals are the imperfect images of his design 
in our being, his purpose concerning our life. 
God gets his deep-laid and mighty moral plan 
into the mind through the glowing forms of the 
imagination ; in the splendid pictures and gor- 
geous banners of the moral idealist, He gives inti- 
mations of his infinite purpose and loving kindness 
for our race ; in the vast and blazing scenery of 
the Christian imagination working upon Chris- 
tian duty, He brings to an apocalypse his re- 
deeming decree, his endless saving grace. As 
God has set in the infinite spaces the stars in all 
their pure and wild beauty as the visible and 
multitudinous tokens of his power, so He has set 
in the heaven of the human imagination the moral 
ideals of mankind, in all their stern and terrible 
loveliness, as the enduring and burning witnesses 
of his character of infinite honor and love. When 
you see these moral ideals working in childhood, 
gleaming now and then through the mists of an- 
imal want and childish interest, when you note 
them in youth coming to a tremendous disclosure 
of their power, flaming forth their indignation at 
sensuality and brutality of every kind and brand- 



WHAT IS THE IDEAL? 35 

ing the young soul with the moral order of the 

world ; when you observe them in mature men ;. 

and women, looking with grief and disdain upon . f ^ 

their slackness, their sordidness, their desertion 

of their high calling and urging them with the 

terrible intensity of moral light and fire to return 

to their duty as men ; when you behold them in 

old age creating an infinite silence, filling the 

gloom of evening with illumination and peace, 

opening the gates and swinging back the ever- ' 

lasting doors that the weary and the heavy-laden ' 

may enter the eternal rest, "put off thy shoes 

from off thy feet, for the place whereon thou 

standest is holy ground." Here you may behold 

the open heavens ; here you may look into the 

supernatural and divine; here you may watch 

something more glorious than sunrise, the dawn 

of the great and terrible day of the Lord, the 

advent of the Kingdom of Christ, the coming of 

the Holy Ghost. 



Ill 

THE UNIVERSAL IDEAL 

" And the Lord went before them by day in a pillar of cloud to lead 
them the way ; and by night in a pillar of fire to give them light." 

Ex. xra, 21. 

Nothing could be more evanescent than cloud 
and fire ; the one vanishes and the other burns 
itself out. Both are types of the perishable in 
life, in literature, in history, in faith, in being. 
God was in them, and so these pillars of cloud 
and of fire became symbols of the presence of 
the eternal in the most fleeting forms of our 
world. In the twofold significance of the words 
of the text, in the adequate and inadequate use 
of it as a type, we shall find ourselves in the 
presence of some of the most fundamental antag- 
onisms of existence. For, after aU, there are but 
two absolutely contrasted and eternally incom- 
patible views of the universe, human life, and 
history ; all the controversies between rival sects 
of believers are almost petty, are certainly inci- 
dental, compared with the great and solemn bat- 
tle which all believers wage with all unbelievers. 
What were the small differences which the early 
Christians had among themselves compared with 
the mighty difference which existed between 



THE UNWEBSAL IDEAL 37 

paganism and Christianity. Great even as the 
rent was between the Catholic Church and the 
Reformers, wide as was the chasm between Leo 
and Luther, between Erasmus and the monks, 
between Loyola and John Calvin, even this tre- 
mendous breach is as nothing when measured 
against the fixed guK that forever separates the 
atheist and the believer. Orthodoxies and heter- 
odoxies are only on the surface, are, indeed, only 
contemptible unless they concern the ultimate 
meanings of man, his history and his universe. 

This explains the catholicity of the greater 
leaders of the Church in every age. They have 
been men of positive convictions within their 
several communions ; they have been, in many 
cases, men whose opinions were wrought into 
fine detail ; but along with this tendency, they 
have cultivated the habit of carrying the hostili- 
ties of faith and life into their fundamental 
forms. They have felt that the differences be- 
tween true believers are as nothing compared to 
those which exist between believers and unbe- 
lievers. How good it is, in the study of the mili- 
tary annals of the world, to get into the deeps 
of history, to stand on the plain of Marathon, on 
the fields of Arbela, Zama, Chalons, Waterloo, 
and Gettysburg, and see in the clashing squad- 
rons the battle of opposing civilizations, to see 
the great captains implicating all times in their 



38 REVELATION AND THE IDEAL 

grand devices, to hear in the thunder of their 
warfare a significance for all peoples. How great 
is one's privilege when one can get down into the 
depths of life, into the really profound things in 
our intellectual and spiritual history, into the 
centres of the ultimate and infinite antagonisms, 
witness the movements upon that field, and hear 
the cannonade that concerns humanity and that 
implicates the universe. This is the privilege 
offered by the text. It takes one into the pres- 
ence of the ultimate and infinite antagonisms of 
faith and life. 

1. There is first the radical and eternal hos- 
tility between belief in God and the denial of 
his existence. Here is a war either to surrender 
of one of the parties to the other, or to annihila- 
tion. Such faith and such denial must fight until 
one or the other shall conquer. They cannot have 
separate and mutual possessions; they cannot 
form treaties of non-interference; they cannot 
live in peace ; they cannot let each other alone. 
The denial of God must strive to cover the uni- 
verse with its awful shadow ; the faith that God 
lives must evermore struggle to put the universe 
under its light. 

Look now how both these contrasted views 
may use the symbolism of the text. What better 
description of atheism could there be than that 
the universe is only vapor and fire. There is the 



THE UNIVERSAL IDEAL 39 

endless change of tides, of days, of seasons, of 
worlds, tlie flow of the cosmic stream from the 
original fiery vapor in which it had its rise, 
through wonderful spheres of order and bril- 
liance, through forms of life infinite in variety 
and exquisite in detail down and out into the 
sea of indistinguishableness and nothingness. 
Look at that pillar of cloud by day, look at that 
pillar of fire by night, and see, in the substance 
that disappears, and in that which burns itself 
out, the symbols of your universe. The word 
" perishable " is written upon its forehead, the 
doom of change, decay, disappearance, and death 
rests upon all things. Nature, with her move- 
ment of tides, her procession of seasons, her solid 
earth and her heaving seas, her waxing and wan- 
ing moons, and her rising and setting suns, her 
wondrous constellations, and all her countless 
worlds of light, is but a show, a pageant, a soap- 
bubble where collapse is certain and swift, and 
so complete as to leave nothing behind it. His- 
tory is but the human parallel to this outward 
vanity. The rise of families, the growth of tribes, 
the organization of nations, the development of 
civilizations, the emergence of ideals, domestic, 
national, and human, the coming of the great 
religions, the advent of Christianity, the greatest 
of them, and all the bright promises with which 
it has starred man's firmament, the whole move- 



40 REVELATION AND THE IDEAL 

ment of mankind is without a guide and without 
a goal. It is simply cloud and fire. It may be 
duU or bright, it may be beautiful or humble ; it 
must be unsubstantial and vain. 

Is it not deeply significant that Scotland, the 
country of great believers, has given to the world 
in Hume the greatest of unbelievers ; that the 
people who have furnished so many poets of faith 
have given in James Thomson's " The City of 
Dreadful Night " the greatest poem of despair 
in our English tongue ? It must convince us that 
what I am saying is not impossible, or remote, 
but most real and near to us aU. There are souls 
who labor with 

" The sense that every struggle brings defeat 
Because Fate holds no prize to crown success; 
That all the oracles are dumb or cheat 
Because they have no secret to express ; 
That none can pierce the vast black veil uncertain 
Because there is no light beyond the curtain — 
That all is vanity and nothingness." 

All that comes from seeing only the perishable 
in the universe, from beholding only the cloud 
and fire. 

But the pillars of cloud and fire are not every- 
thing ; they are only the temporal forms through 
which God looks. God is in the pageant of na- 
ture, and while it passes. He does not pass. God 
is in the drama of history, and although all the 
actors die on the stage of time, the Eternal still 



THE UNIVEBSAL IDEAL 41 

abides. We grant at once that nature is but a 
cosmic stream, a stream that may at any mo- 
ment run dry ; we concede that history cannot 
be forever upon this planet, that it must end ; 
but we hold that the fountain of nature is the 
Eternal, and that the source and end of human 
life is from everlasting to everlasting. Atheism 
has many sources, many palliations in the case of 
the oppressed ; but its chief source is the want 
of insight. One man sees nothing but the show, 
the passing and perishable in nature and in hu- 
manity ; another man sees the Eternal in every- 
thing. Atheism is to be cured, not so much by 
logical refutation — although that is good — as 
by opening the eyes of the blind. Christ gave 
men the disinterested mind, and the pure heart; 
then came the vision of God. God is as near to 
mankind as Jesus was to his two disciples on 
their walk to Emmaus. He was with them, en- 
tered into their sorrow and despair, made their 
dead hopes live and burn again, and so intensi- 
fied his presence in their life that at last their 
eyes were opened and they knew Him. So near 
is God to men. He is in the cloud and fire of 
their life, in their doubt, sorrow, and despair, in 
their whole human fellowship; He is in their 
thought. He is speaking to them, and some day 
his presence will be so manifest in their experi- 
ence that they must discover Him. Meanwhile 



42 REVELATION AND THE IDEAL 

we must remember that belief and unbelief are 
largely matters of insight or the want of it. Is- 
raelites and Egyptians both saw the pillars of 
cloud and of fire ; but while the Egyptians saw 
nothing but the vapor and the fire, the Israelites 
knew that God was in them. Both believers and 
unbelievers see the pageant of nature and the 
drama of history ; but while the unbeliever sees 
nothing but perishable forms and generations 
marching to death, the believer beholds the 
Eternal God. And he measures his insight 
against his brother's denial ; he sustains his an- 
tagonism to atheism by the clearness, assurance, 
and joy of his vision of the Infinite. 

2. Another antagonism, only second in impor- 
tance to that which I have been presenting, con- 
cerns the higher possibility of human life. One 
of the fiercest and most persistent of creeds is 
that selfishness is the law of human life, that 
appetite is the supreme force in the human heart, 
that the cloudy comfort and the fiery pleasure 
are everything, that the march into personal gain 
by day and the passionate indulgence by night 
are the only ultimate objects of desire. If there 
is anything in human life other than vapor and 
fire, if there is any presence in the pillars of 
cloud and flame, it is not that of God, but that 
of the Devil. There is something worse even than 
immorality, and that is no morality. There are 



THE UNIVERSAL IDEAL 43 

SO many who never think of honor. There are so 
many more who, when they do think of higher 
things, run away from life. Whenever they think 
of amendment they think of reading a pious 
book, or attending church once on Sunday, or 
perhaps of even venturing to a prayer meeting. 
They do not grasp the fact that God is seeking 
expression through the discipline of their appe- 
tites, the chastity of their passions, the order of 
their homes, their behavior in business, their 
fidelity and public spirit as citizens, their human- 
ity as men. They do not seem to know what 
morality is, what religion is. They are simply 
fire and vapor ; with possibly the addition of the 
Devil. 

Here is the line of our second grand antago- 
nism. Human life is vapor and fire, a mere pass- 
ing show, a mere material force. It is all that ; 
but it is infinitely more. It has in it the presence 
of God, and the purpose of the cloud is to utter 
through its benign shade the infinite Pity, the 
purpose of the fire is to disclose through its flame 
God's bright and everlasting Love. The pillars 
were divine leaders to poor Israel, and divine 
leaders, revealers of God and guides from God, 
men must be to their fellow-men. Appetites men 
have, but they are not aU appetite ; passions they 
have, but they are not aU passion; strugglers for 
life they are, but not only strugglers for life ; 



44 REVELATION AND THE IDEAL 

kindred with the animals they are, but kindred 
also with something higher. There is the longing 
for beauty ; there is the hunger for righteousness; 
there is the aptitude for succoring the distressed ; 
there is the hope of a better life ; there is the 
sense of an eternal moral order uttering itself 
through the conscience of the individual and the 
constitution of society ; there is the sublime ca- 
pacity for God and for becoming his revealers, 
his leaders and servants to our fellow-men. If 
man is a simple materialism, morality is impos- 
sible ; if he is only a cloud and a fire, to look in 
him for love and honor is an absurdity. 

You see here how interpretation either vindi- 
cates the highest life for man or fiercely denies 
its possibility. We cannot be upon both sides of 
this conflict. We cannot believe that man is a 
mere materialism, and fight the good fight for 
righteousness, fight for the revelation of God to 
our feUow-men. If we are to do this, it must be 
because we see the soul within the body, and God 
within the soul. Insight is the origin of faith in 
God; insight is the inspiration of aU high en- 
deavor. 

3. Here we come upon a third antagonism of 
our time : that between the merely earthly life 
and the immortal. Everything depends, in this 
question of immortality, upon what we see in 
human life. We shall take sides for or against 



THE UNIVERSAL IDEAL 45 

the endless life according as we see little or much 
in man. Over no single belief in the whole body 
of our faith is there more agitation than over 
this. Is it possible to convert the imagination of 
future life, the vague fancy, the delightful dream 
into an honest conviction, into a reasonable hope, 
into a sincere and powerful expectation ? There 
are many people in our time serious and high- 
minded, ready for aU good works, who are full 
of hesitation here. While the realm beyond death 
never exercised a deeper or nobler interest over 
the human mind than it does to-day, the number 
who are without any influential hope is very great. 
The explanation of this incapacity for active faith 
in the endless life does not seem to me to lie in 
the currency of scientific notions. For the pro- 
f oundest science has been able so far to throw no 
light upon the relation of brain and mind, or 
upon the ultimate mystery of life and death. 
The explanation of this inability to believe in the 
hereafter seems to me to lie in the fact that at- 
tention is too much fixed upon the perishable 
side of life. We see in man, for the most part, 
only the cloud and the fire ; we see the one van- 
ishing and the other burning itself out. We note 
only the changeful, the evanescent in our exist- 
ence, and therefore we do not see any ground for 
perpetuated life. We further see, altogether too 
exclusively, the weakness, the wickedness and 



46 REVELATION AND THE IDEAL 

the worthlessness of our fellow-men ; and we say 
inwardly that these masses of mankind are ugly 
as a fog-bank, and vain as a dying fire. Yet again 
the mortal side of life seems so obvious, it is on 
the surface, and for those who look only on the 
surface, there is nothing that speaks of immor- 
tality. Thus an exclusive concern with the per- 
ishable in man, an exclusive sense of the moral 
worthlessness of men, and a failure to look hard 
at life, to go below its surface, are to my mind 
the chief causes of unbelief upon this grave 
theme. Perhaps I should add also the feeling of 
surprise that belief in the soul's immortality 
should be difficult. If the Israelites had thought 
only of the transient nature of the cloud and fire, 
if they had thought only of their poor and dead 
materialism, if they had been content to look 
only on the surface, if they had been surprised 
and overwhelmed over the concealment of God, 
they could never have experienced his guidance 
and protection. Go inward through the perish- 
able in man, look into the heart of the cloud, 
into the centre of the fire, and you will find a liv- 
ing soul. You will find a being with a scheme of 
the universe, crude enough, indeed, yet wonder- 
ful ; with a sense of the divine order over him, 
under him, and roundabout him, with a sense of 
accountability to that order for thought, speech, 
and behavior ; you will find a being with a ca- 



THE UNIVERSAL IDEAL 47 

pacity for communion with the Eternal, with an 
aptitude for the life from God, a being with per- 
sistent thoughts, enduring purposes and death- 
less love ; a being with a life that has already 
survived a thousand shocks, and that is the 
worthy heir of the endless years. Find the imma- 
terial in the material, the imperishable in the 
perishable, that which has been constant amid 
the fleeting ; find God in the cloud and in the 
fire, and immortality will seem the only reason- 
able faith. 

It is a great thing to believe in God with all 
one's heart. It is a great thing to rise to the grasp 
of the Christian creed at any point. It calls for 
the deepest sincerity and earnestness. Humanity, 
intelligent humanity, is not treated to its faith, 
as the mother bird treats its helpless brood in 
the nest, finding the worm and putting it into 
their open mouths. There are no ready-made 
clothes for the soul, and no food for the heart of 
the inactive. The mature bird finds its food either 
on the wing or by digging ; and the human mind 
must toil, must both dig and soar, if it is to come 
into the great possession of a rational and living 
Christian faith. 

It is a vast help to faith to remember that 
permanence is the great note of human great- 
ness. Even in human productions we look for 
the eternal through the temporal. The picture 



48 REVELATION AND THE IDEAL 

that always keeps its charm, the song that is 
sung by all the generations, the building that 
even when it has become a ruin maintains its 
sway over the imagination, the books that are 
the abiding teachers of mankind, the characters 
that interest all ages and all peoples — these are 
the productions, these are the men that we call 
great. The value of a character, a book, an age 
is to be determined by the mass of the Eternal 
that there is in it. God's presence made that va- 
grant cloud and that uncertain fire enduring as 
this earth, and God's presence determines the 
worth and lastingness of all things, all produc- 
tions, and all beings. When we discover that 
only the works, the thoughts, the characters, and 
the spirit that transcend time are really worth 
anything, that only these are the truly great 
things in human history, we are all the stronger 
in our stand for the immovable things of the 
Christian faith. 

One of the finest views in Switzerland is ob- 
tained from the summit of the Bernina Pass. It 
is seven thousand six hundred feet high, and 
from this elevation the entire valley of the En- 
gadine is visible, with the peaks of a hundred 
mountains ranging from eight thousand to thir- 
teen thousand feet in height. Then in another 
direction the glorious view extends into Italy, the 
prospect melting upon the far horizons into an 



THE UNIVERSAL IDEAL 49 

enchantment of beauty. But to me, as I stood 
upon this pass, the most impressive sight was not 
the deep blue of the cloudless sky, nor the sub- 
lime summits that rose in stainless white and 
dazzling brightness into its pure depths, nor the 
far prospect of combined beauty and grandeur; 
but the two quiet lakes that stood so near to- 
gether, separated only by about a hundred feet. 
So near are they at the first, so far apart are 
they at the last ; for the waters of the one end 
in the Adriatic and those of the other end in the 
Black Sea ! And all this difference at the end is 
because of the seemingly slight difference at the 
beginning. The watershed is between them, and 
because of that decisive elevation, they can never 
join, they must forever flow farther and farther 
apart. That points the great question of life. 
Where do you begin? On which side of the 
watershed of being do you live ? You may be 
very near each other at the first, you and your 
believing friend. He believes in God, and you do 
not ; he believes in disclosing God through this 
poor earthly life, and you do not ; he believes 
that the spirit of man lives forever, and you do 
not ; and this vastness of your inherent difference 
is hidden by the fact that in your business, in 
your neighborhood, in many of your tasks and 
interests you are so near. You are on one side 
of this great watershed and he is on the other. 



60 BEVEL ATION AND THE IDEAL 

These two lakes that seem so near, at the first, 
are at last as wide apart as east and west. So 
great are the antagonisms, so wide are the con- 
trasts, so far away from one another at the end, 
are the believer and the unbeliever, the devotee 
of righteousness and the apostle of pleasure, the 
communicaijt in the Kingdom of the Eternal and 
the fugitive among the shadows of time, the wor- 
shiper of the living God in Christ, and the dis- 
ciple of cloud and fire. 



IV 

THE SENSE OF THE IDEAL PRESENCE 

" If I take the wings of the morning and dwell in the uttermost parts 
of the sea, even there shall thy hand lead me, and thy right hand shall 
hold me." 

Ps. cxxxnt, 9-10. 

"When we look at a piece of noble tapestry, we 
see at once how mucli it owes to the figure in it, 
to its color, its character, its distinction ; and in 
the same way when we examine a specimen of 
great literature, we perceive at a glance how 
much the wisdom and the sentiment of that lit- 
erature are indebted to the imagery in it. We 
all agree with Edmund Burke, in his contention 
that a fine sentence should be composed of three 
parts, a striking truth, a corresponding senti- 
ment, both rendered doubly striking by a beau- 
tiful figure ; and we recall at once this orator's 
exemplification of his canon, when, in the heated 
political campaign in Bristol, his comrade fell 
dead at his side, and that immortal figure sprang 
from Burke's lips, " What shadows we are and 
what shadows we pursue." In a series of fig- 
ures bearing upon the evanescence of pleasure, 
Burke's great contemporary, Robert Burns, has 
enriched our tongue for all time : — 



52 REVELATION AND THE IDEAL 

*' Pleasures are like poppies spread, 
You seize the flower, its bloom is shed ; 
Or, like the snow-fall in the river, 
A moment white, then melts forever ; 
Or, like the borealis race. 
That flit ere you can point their place ; 
Or, like the rainbow's lovely form, 
Evanishing amid the storm," 



Great literature, of course, consists in golden 
wisdom, in noble sentiment, in high and true 
manner ; yet the imagery in great literature is 
a source of wonder and delight ; it is besides a 
lightening force in the service of wisdom and of 
sentiment. Carlyle, wise and strong, is particu- 
larly serviceable here by the number of beautiful 
images that he has added to our speech. When 
he speaks of Harriet Martineau's soul " as clean 
as river sand" ; when he writes of his wife that 
" she was the rainbow to my poor dripping day " ; 
when he describes his aged mother sinking in 
death, " as the last pale sickle of the moon, sink- 
ing in dark seas " ; when he remarks on the lines 
that John Sterling wrote him, four days before 
he died, that " they were written in star fire and 
in immortal tears," he is adding to the volume of 
the precious speech of mankind. Once more this 
great writer resting in the evening by the Sol- 
way sees in the " North an Aurora — footlights 
of this great theatre of a universe where you and 
I are players for an hour." 



THE SENSE OF THE IDEAL PRESENCE 53 

We cannot forget that noble image of Words- 
worth — he is not rich in images — when he speaks 
of the " Eye that hath kept watch o'er man's mor- 
tality " ; nor must we pass Goethe's great figure 
in " Faust," where the " Time Spirit " sings : — 

" At the whirring loom of time unawed 
I work the living mantle of God." 

We speak of Bacon as a scientific man. Science 
has gone utterly beyond him in its vision, in its 
achievement, and in its method; he lives by his 
wisdom, by his sentiment, by his manner; and 
part of the charm and wonder of his manner is 
his richness in imagery. Who can forget the first 
sentence in his " Essay on Death," — " Men fear 
death as children fear to go in the dark " ; or one 
of his great sentences in his " Essay on Truth," 
— " Certainly it is heaven upon earth to have a 
man's mind move in charity, rest in Providence, 
and turn upon the poles of truth." 

What shall we say of Shakespeare's addition to 
our life here ? Let me remind you of one or two of 
his shining and surpassing contributions : " They 
that stand high have many blasts to shake them, 
and if they fall they dash themselves in pieces." 
" After life's fitful fever, he sleeps well ! " 

" Love is not love 
Which alters when it alteration finds, 
Or bends with the remover to remove ; 
O) no ! it is an ever-fix^d mark. 



64 REVELATION AND THE IDEAL 

That looks on tempests, and is never shaken ; 

It is the star to every wandering bark, 

Whose worth 's unknown, although his height be taken." 

And then that figure which gives us the glory of 
the philanthropist, the glory of the friend of man, 
" A tomb of orphans' tears." I know of no ex- 
ercise more enriching for the young in their study 
of great literature than to fasten its wisdom and 
its high passion in their memory through these 
glorious images. 

When we turn to religion we find the same 
thing. Figurative speech in religion at its worst 
is enigmatic, confusing, disappointing ; at its best 
it is an apocalypse of the Eternal through the 
temporal ; besides it is freedom and delight. Think 
for a moment of the imagery in the teaching of 
Jesus: the hen and her brood, the leaven, the 
mustard seed, the pearl of great price, the lost 
sheep, the lost coin and the lost son, the vine 
and the branches, the sower going forth to sow, 
the sun shining upon the evil and the good, the 
rain falling on the just and the unjust. The teach- 
ing of Jesus has its wisdom and passion inlaid 
with images significant, beautiful, burdened with 
tender humanity. Consider the imagery of the 
great prophets : " Though your sins be as scarlet, 
they shall be white as snow ; though they be red 
like crimson, they shall be like wool." What a 
history lies behind that metaphor. You find the 



THE SENSE OF THE IDEAL PRESENCE 55 

dye in Plato, but you do not find that which 
takes the dye out. Or, again, " the sun shall be 
no more thy light by day, neither for brightness 
shall the moon give light unto thee ; the Lord 
shall be unto thee an everlasting light and thy 
God, thy glory." The splendor of the sensuous 
world is here used to proclaim the coming time 
when it shall be done away, when the Eternal 
that now looks through it, as God looked through 
the pillars of cloud and of fire, will some day 
come in its own strength and flood the moral uni- 
verse with its illumination and peace. 

There is the imagery in the Psalms : " Let the 
sea roar and the fulness thereof. Let all the 
trees of the field clap their hands." " Thou 
makest the outgoings of the morning and the 
evening to rejoice " ; as if God lifted up his face 
in the sunrise and glowed with the fires of his 
love in the sunset. Consider, too, this image in 
the text, to which, after so much delay, I have 
come, " The wings of the morning." Think of 
this Psalmist as standing on some Judaean hiU, 
looking eastward over the Judaean wilderness, 
over the Jordan, beyond the hills of Moab, out 
on the illimitable desert ; as he stands there he 
sees the sun coming up, a great bird, with head 
of fire, breast of fire, feet of fire, and wings all 
purple and gold ; out of the Infinite he sees this 
mystic bird speeding on its way with broader 



J 



56 REVELATION AND THE IDEAL 

and stronger and more glorious wings ; its fiery 
head bends with the progress of the hours toward 
the south ; later its great eyes look toward the 
west ; at length down in the splendor of the far 
sea it sinks into the unseen. What imagery ! Is 
there anything in all literature so original, so 
bold, so sublime? 

We now ask what is the burden of meaning, 
the content of thought borne by this great image ? 
There is an experience in God ; there is a per- 
sonal faith issuing from the experience ; there is 
an interpretation of human life in the light of 
the experience and the faith. Give me your at- 
tention for a few moments to each of these three 
significant ideas concealed in the glorious speech 
of this Psalmist. 

1. First of all, look at the experience. This 
man discovers that his life is in God. He has a 
life with a hundred needs ; it seems to him as if 
his nature were a hundred fiery tongues calling 
for service ; a hundred helpers are meeting that 
hundred -tongued need within his soul. These 
helpers are not final ; they are provisional, de- 
pendent, temporary like himself ; through their 
service he seeks the Eternal Helper. He has 
needs that no man can meet — the need of honor, 
the need of a deeper and purer heart, the need 
of a happier spirit, the need of courage, hope, 
peace, thanksgiving, praise. Thus God wells up 



THE SENSE OF THE IDEAL PRESENCE 57 

in his soul through a vast range of unsatisfied 
needs ; needs that are more and more met out of 
the Infinite. 

Close by the need he finds the sense of obli- 
gation. He is under bonds to many ; he is under 
bonds to them in the name of the Eternal. These 
obligations do not exhaust his conscience ; he is 
in duty bound to God. God speaks to him and 
he answers; in his conscience he finds God. Next 
door to duty is the sense of privilege ; a multitude 
of human beings contribute to that sense of privi- 
lege every day ; but again, they are provisional 
contributors and through them the Eternal Con- 
tributor speaks. Beyond human mediation of the 
Divine there is the grace, the favor, the beauty 
of the Lord his God that falls upon him imme- 
diately from the Infinite face. These are the 
inmost realities of this Psalmist's soul ; need met 
in God ; the bond that unites him to the con- 
science of God ; the sense of privilege fed out of 
the Infinite heart. These are the central certain- 
ties of this man's spirit ; he finds that they are 
with him wherever he goes ; at home, abroad, in 
the city, in the country, in the crowd, alone, north, 
south, east, west, everywhere the same great forces 
work within him; his God is with him every- 
where ; his being is in the eternal mystery of the 
Divine Being. 

In so far as one is religious to-day, he reaps a 



58 REVELATION AND THE IDEAL 

similar experience ; if one has any religion at all 
it is of this nature. The soul has found a need 
greater than man can meet ; a need met in part 
by men who themselves are the servants of the 
greater Man, a need transcendent and met only 
by the transcendent God. Further, man finds 
himself under obligation to himself, to his higher 
nature; he finds himself in duty bound to his 
family, to his city, to his country, to his kind, 
and beyond all to his God. Still further, he finds 
it good to live ; the fountains of happiness are in 
his heart, fed by a thousand springs, and the 
springs go deep till they strike the waters of the 
Eternal. There is where religion begins ; it is an 
experience in God. 

Religion in our time is becoming aware of its 
strength, of its essential reality, of its independ- 
ence of any given theology or any given philos- 
ophy of religion ; it is traveling like God in the 
greatness of its might. It is as if this old planet 
of ours were self-conscious ! What would it care 
about the science of geology or the science of 
astronomy ; on it goes, and it knows it goes in the 
fellowship of the Infinite. That is religion, the 
great interest of man, personal religion set free 
from particular schemes of theology, from par- 
ticular schemes of philosophy ; not set free from 
ideas, but inwrought with ideas, going in its own 
strength, independent, everlasting, fed from the 



THE SENSE OF THE IDEAL PRESENCE 59 

heart of the Eternal ! I beseech you to take that 
as your conception of religion ; it is the concep- 
tion of religion that prevails in the Hebrew 
Scriptures, in the Christian Scriptures, revived 
and set free in our time by a thousand great souls. 
2. We come now to the faith that is born of 
this experience. What do we mean by the faith 
that issues from life ? Let us note the path over 
which we have come. This man had a personal 
experience that he was alive in God by his need 
and his need met; by his conscience, and his 
conscience set at rest ; by the sense of privilege 
in life. That experience he generalized. God is in 
him, God is in the universe. It is a process like 
Newton's when he saw the single apple fall ; forth- 
with he beheld a law that held valid for the en- 
tire universe. It was a movement of mind like 
that of Jesus when he saw the dead sparrow ; the 
providence of God is over all. This man thus 
generalized from his own life : that life could not 
be where God is not ; the universe itself and all 
in it could not be where God is not. That is what 
we mean by a faith. The great basis of all true 
faith is a personal experience in God. The relig- 
ious man discovers his own life in God ; then he 
generalizes that experience into a universal pres- 
ence. That is faith, the God who is within beheld 
as objective, omnipresent, over all and blessed 
forever. 



60 REVELATION AND THE IDEAL 

I beg you for one moment to look at the rela- 
tion of science and philosophy to faith. Science 
is led by the idea of the intelligibleness of the 
cosmos. It believes that everything in outward 
nature can be understood and brought under the 
forms of human knowledge ; it believes that na- 
ture can be seen through and through, absolutely 
comprehended. That is the ideal of science. The 
ideal of philosophy is that the totality of the 
universe, nature and man together, are intelligi- 
ble. If we had power enough and time enough 
we could see through all mysteries, all darkness, 
all difficulties ; the unknown would vanish in the 
known. These are the ideals that keep science and 
philosophy alive, — the intelligibility of this uni- 
verse in which we live, the faith that it is built 
on reason, that its structure is in the understand- 
ing, that it is moulded through and through upon 
the principles that answer to the intellect of man. 

What now is the position of faith ? It puts in 
the place of an ideal the Divine Person ; the 
cosmos is intelligible because God made it ; the 
universe is intelligible because God is in it, and 
because finally God is It. Take as illustration 
this earth of ours. It is as if the land were an 
intellect and knew itself and knew everything in 
it ; it is as if the sea were an understanding and 
were conscious of itself and of all that filled its 
depth ; it is as if infinite space were an intellect, 



THE SENSE OF TEE IDEAL PRESENCE 61 

comprehending itself and comprehending all the 
contents of space. This faith declares that the 
universe in its last reality is the mind of God, 
self -comprehending, comprehending all things ; 
justifying, therefore, the ideals of science and the 
ideals of philosophy ; thus the great faith precedes 
and gives vitality and authentication to the great 
science and the great philosophy. 

Here you will see how profound religion keeps 
the integrity of the human spirit in the presence 
of the Infinite Spirit. Why is it that we are not 
overwhelmed by the Eternal God, who is omni- 
present, omniscient, filling all and all ? Why is 
it that pantheism has no standing or part in 
Hebraism, no part or standing in Christianity ? 
Because God does not wipe out the soul, because 
he lifts up and greatens the spirit of man. The 
personality of man is emphasized, authenticated, 
lifted into grandeur and beauty by the power of 
religion. The man who knows that he is a sinner, 
that he has been forgiven, that a new habit of 
righteousness has come to him, by the grace of 
God, indeed, but also through tears and trouble, 
and who is living a life of strenuous obedience to 
the Divine Will cannot consent to be described 
as a bubble on the stream of time, a wave on the 
crest of being, a mere ring of smoke in the air ; 
he is a reality whom God has purified, whom God 
has enriched, whom God has greatened, whom. 



y 



62 REVELATION AND THE IDEAL 

God has lifted up, whom God has addressed as 
" Thou," calling upon him to answer the Eternal 
Thou. 

The palace of crystal when the sun rises upon 
it and floods it with the light of noon is not an- 
nihilated ; it is made resplendent and all its con- 
tents are glorified by the illumination flowing in 
upon it. When our God is a moral God, when 
the moral Deity floods the personality with his 
light and infinity, he does not wipe it out; he 
makes it transparent, he fills it with splendor ; 
he clothes it with a mightier reality and majesty. 
3. And finally, there is the interpretation of 
all human life in the light of this experience, in 
the light of this faith. If you want a man to in- 
terpret human life, be sure that he comes with a 
"^ great soul ; with a great soul that has universal- 
ized itself in a great faith for mankind. Man is 
the measure of his faith ; the greater man the 
greater faith ; the Divine Man the divine faith. 
Christianity comes out of the soul of Jesus Christ ; 
without his life in God his gospel for the world 
could not be ; his interpretation of human exist- 
ence could not be. If you would see the meaning 
of the infinitely great and the infinitely small, 
build your glass with the mightier lens ; if you 
would behold the dignity of man, the meaning of 
; man's life at each stage of its movement, read it 

/ through the vision of the greatest souls. 



THE SENSE OF THE IDEAL PRESENCE 63 

There are three divisions in human life. There 
is the morning with sunrise for its symbol ; there 
is life's prime set forth in the noon; there is 
evening with its sunset in the sea. What is the 
source of the charm and wonder in childhood, set 
forth by the freshness, the fragrance of the morn- 
ing, by the beauty and promise of daybreak, by 
the silent miracle of color in the east, by the 
uplift of ineffable glory in the gates of day ? Is 
it not that God is in the instincts of childhood, 
in the structure of its nature, in the simplicity 
and clinging affections of its dear heart, in the 
blue of its eyes, the fire of its awakening spirit, 
in the whole mystic prophecy of its life ? We do 
well when we interpret the childhood of the world 
into the Godhood of the universe. 

The second division of our existence is soon 
upon us, when the sun is no longer in the 
east, but high in the heavens ; when the notes of 
his career are strength, scope, sweep, conquest. 
What do these notes signify but man in his great 
prime ? Look at a great human being in the prime 
of existence, and what are his notes? Strength, 
scope, sweep, conquest. What do these mean? 
They mean moral strength, moral scope, moral 
sweep, moral conquest. And what do these mean ? 
That God in his splendor and power reigns in the 
strong man's life. 

The third division of our existence is now upon 



64 REVELATION AND THE IDEAL 

US ; the sun is sinking in the sea ; the red clouds 
of evening are gathering round it, and in the 
pathos and beauty of the end we read the mean- 
ing of the deepest mystery of our human life. 
The good life comes at length to the end of the 
day ; in its decline there is beauty ; in its wreck 
there is fire ; as it sinks and seems to be engulfed 
in the abysses of darkness up through its weak- 
ness, in the place where it shone but a moment 
^ ago, there comes the sudden surprise of the ut- 
most splendor and tenderness of our God. The 
awe of birth is in the advent of God ; when in 
deeper awe we stand in the presence of our dead 
we are again face to face with God. AU life lies 
within the compass of God's life ; our morning, 
our noon, and our evening, our birth, our prime, 
our end are within the circle of his heart. 

Sunset here means sunrise elsewhere ; evening 
here means morning in other lands. Death is our 
name for birth into the heavenly world, the end 
in gloom the beginning in the vaster and brighter 
light. I like to believe that the soul goes as the 
sun goes, leaving the world dark because it goes, 
but itself essential light and fire, making for it- 
self a luminous pathway in the new and mightier 
service upon which it has entered. While the sun 
survives, the last day can never come ; till then 
every sunset must be a sunrise. While the soul 
lives in God and God in the soul, the final scene 



THE SENSE OF THE IDEAL PBESENCE 65 

can never arrive ; till then every evening must 
be tlie obverse of a new and richer morning. Our 
world is a vanishing world, but it appears and 
vanishes in response to thfe infinite good will of 
God. He is builder, dissolver, rebuilder. 

" Not of adamant and gold 
Built he heaven stark and cold; 
No, but a nest of bending reeds, 
Flowering grass and scented weeds; 
Or like a traveler's fleeing tent. 
Or bow above the tempest bent; 
Built of tears and sacred flames, 
And Virtue reaching to its aims; 
Built of furtherance and pursuing. 
Not of spent deeds, but of doing. 
Silent rushes the swift Lord 
Through ruined systems still restored, 
Broadsowing, bleak and void to bless. 
Plants with worlds the wilderness; 
Waters with tears of ancient sorrow 
Apples of Eden ripe to-morrow. 
House and tenant go to ground. 
Lost in God, in Godhead found." 



THE UNESCAPABLE IDEAL 

" Even the night shall be light about me.'* 

Ps. oxxxix, 11. 

The universe comes to us under two great forms ; 
it comes under the form of day and under the 
form of night. It is natural that we should 
greatly prefer the day. Our physical existence 
is dependent upon the heat and the light of the 
sun ; and our vocations aU lie in the sunshine. 
Our world circles the sun and the sun seems to 
belong to us, and day means health, opportunity, 
joy, hope. Symbolically, too, the day is great. 
" God is light and in him is no darkness at aU." 
He is the Father of Lights. Our Lord Jesus 
said of Himself, " I am the Light of the World," 
and He called upon his disciples to let their 
light so shine before men that others, seeing 
their good works, should glorify their Father who 
is in heaven. 

We have come to identify this Light with the 
light of our day ; at least we have come to find a 
symbol of that light in the light of day. Perhaps 
the most beautiful comparison that Jesus ever 
made was in speaking of the magnanimity of 



THE UNESCAPABLE IDEAL 67 

God, " He makes his sun to rise upon the evil 
and the good." " Truly the light is sweet, and a 
pleasant thing it is for the eyes to behold the sun," 
The most magnificent comparison in ancient lit- 
erature is found, I think, in the sixth book of 
the " Republic " of Plato, where the sun is de- 
scribed as the centre of the visible universe, cre- 
ating aU life, sustaining all life, feeding the eye 
so that it leaps into vision, beautifying all, trans- 
figuring all ; analogous to that is God in the form 
of the good, the heart of the universe, creating aU 
intelligence, feeding all intelligence, shedding 
beauty, power, growth, and hope into aU intelli- 
gent and intelligible worlds. 

AU this makes day great, and when we turn 
to darkness we think of it with a kind of dread. 
Night is the symbol of wildness and death. " Men 
fear death as children fear to go in the dark," 
says Bacon. Criminals creep about in the city 
and country during the night. Beasts of prey do 
their work in the night. Milton sings of his grief 
in his blindness in a symbolic way : — 

*' Seasons return; but not to me returns 
Day, or the sweet approach of even or mom, 
Or sight of vernal bloom or summer's rose, 
Or flocks, or herds, or human face divine; 
But cloud instead, and ever-during dark 
Surrounds me; from the cheerful ways of men 
Cut off, and for the book of knowledge fair 
Presented with a universal blank." 



68 REVELATION AND THE IDEAL 

All our prepossessions, therefore, are in favor of 
the day, and this for physical reasons and for 
symbolic reasons ; the day is beautiful,. and who 
would say a word against it in its bounty, its 
loveliness, and its essential ministry to man ? 

There is, however, something to be said for the 
other form in which the universe comes to us, 
the night. It may be that we shall realize with 
the Psalmist that even the night shall be light 
about us. Let us see. There can be no question 
that night is an amazing surprise. If we were 
living in the first day of time and had never seen 
night, we should expect when the sun set that 
everything would go to wreck, that there would 
be nothing beyond. Think of a soap-bubble float- 
ing through the air and a pygmy sitting inside 
blinded by the glare of its beauty and unable to 
see beyond. Do you not imagine that that pygmy 
would think the collapse of the bubble would 
leave nothing in existence ? 

Suppose that a bird in process of being hatched 
should be able to think. What a fearful panic 
its little heart would be thrown into when the 
shell began to break ! There is really nothing be- 
yond ; the reality is all inside ; and yet the bub- 
ble breaks into day and the broken shell sets the 
bird free. When the sun goes down and the 
world seems blotted out, look what comes : even- 
ing star after evening star, shining group after 



THE UNESCAPABLE IDEAL 69 

shining group, constellation after constellation, 
galaxy after galaxy, until an infinite universe 
is revealed. What an amazing surprise ! We 
thought there was nothing beyond this little 
" garish day," and we find that our little bit of 
day is as the Qgg in which the bird is living to 
our world, as the soap-bubble with our fancied 
pygmy inside to the great sun-illumined spaces. 
The amazing surprise is night; the stupendous- 
ness of the reality of the physical universe. 

Take night as a symbol. You have your pleas- 
ure, and you say, "What should I do if this 
pleasure should come to an end ? There is noth- 
ing beyond for me but pain." And you go into 
that world of pain and what do you find ? Wis- 
dom. You have your human treasure, and you 
say, " What should I do if I should lose that dear 
father or mother or friend or child ? I know my 
heart would be wrung and there would be noth- 
ing beyond." And yet, in that world of sorrow, 
you find purity of heart, awe, exaltation, trust. 

Here is your ease, here is the protection of 
your life in your early home. You look out upon 
the brutal world with its appeals to lust and the 
strong animal in you. You wonder if you should 
be able to stand like a man if you were thrown 
out there ; — would you not be degraded, would 
you not lose all the fine things that have come to 
you through the protection of your life in your 



70 REVELATION AND THE ILEAL 

safe environment ? Necessity comes with her lash, 
you are driven out, and what do you find ? New 
manhood, new character, new hatred of vice, new 
love of righteousness, a world of whose existence 
you did not dream. You remember what the poet 
Burns says about misfortune : — 

" And, eveo should misfortunes come, 
I here who sit hae met wi' some, 

An 's thankfu' for them yet, 
They gie the wit of age to youth ; 

They let us ken ourself ; 
They make us see the naked truth, 

The real guid and ill : 
Tho' losses and crosses 

Be lessons right seyere, 
There 's wit there, ye '11 get there, 

Ye '11 find nae other where." 

Think of the surprise of the vast shining worlds 
that wait for us in the darkness of our discipline. 
Why should it not be so with death? We iden- 
tify life with light and death — what is death? 
It is darkness and night. May there not be here 
awaiting us the supreme surprise? When our 
poor, garish existence breaks away, may it not 
be that the soul shall find itself face to face with 
immeasurable ranges of glory? That is the last 
surprise, and this thought has been put in one of 
the most beautiful sonnets in the English lan- 
guage : — 

" Mysterious Night ! when our first parent knew 
Thee, from report divine, and heard thy name, 



THE UNESCAPABLE IDEAL 71 

Did he not tremble for this lovely frame, — 
This glorious canopy of light and blue ? 
Yet, 'neath a curtain of translucent dew, 
Bathed in the rays of the great setting flame, 
Hesperus, with the host of heaven came, 
And lo ! creation widened in man's view. 
Who could have thought such darkness lay concealed 
Within thy beams, O Sun ! or who could find 
Whilst fly and leaf and insect stood revealed. 
That to such countless orbs thou mad'st us blind ! 
Why do we then shun death with anxious strife ? 
If light can thus deceive, wherefore not life ? " 

The surprise of night is the surprise that God 
gives us when he shakes us out of pleasure into 
pain, out of ease into hardship, but of good for- 
tune into misfortune, out of the protected exist- 
ence into the tried and vexed, out of life into 
death. Then comes the infinite surprise. 

Again, night is a vast discipline in intellectual 
power, not only for the scientific intellect, not 
only for the poetic mind, but also for all human 
beings who have a spark of intelligence in 
them. The night with its stars has brooded the 
mind of the world from time immemorial, and 
expanded imagination, feeling, instinct, and divin- 
ing wonder. You go to sea now and then ; I am 
sure you love to go on deck when the sun is down 
and the night is clear and the stars are out. There 
you are on your ship, sailing the great ocean ; 
there is the planet on whose ocean you sail, itself 
a ship on its own voyage through space ; and there 



72 REVELATION AND THE IDEAL 

are the other shining worlds, in clusters, in fleets, 
all sailing on their great courses. It is impossible 
to take in a scene like that without expansion and 
elevation of the intellect, without the greatening 
of human intelligence. This influence of night 
upon thought has been going on through all the 
centuries of time. 

The French philosopher Bergson in his most 
important book begins by calling attention to the 
practical character of the human intellect. He 
says it is given to provide for the body, to guide 
the body, to preserve it, to make a home for it, 
to fulfill primarily the uses of the body. He ex- 
presses in this thought in a striking way a re- 
mark that has been current among intelligent 
people for a long time ; but he fails to observe, 
I think, that this is only the first stage of the 
intellect. True, we have to look out for our bodies, 
provide food, clothing, shelter, live in families 
and again provide for our families, enter voca- 
tions that have an economic and practical bear- 
ing ; so the great world goes on. Our intellect is 
practical in the narrowest and clearest sense to 
begin with, but if you stop there you do not get 
the essential intellect of man at all. 

What is the ideal of science? To understand 
the whole cosmos : what bearing has that upon 
bread and butter ? What is the ideal of art ? To 
build anew through creative imagination, by the 



THE UNESCAPABLE IDEAL 73 

help of color and sound and form, the beauty of 
the universe. Again, is that practical ? Is it not 
a value in itself ? Is it not what the Greeks call 
freedom? What is the ideal of philosophy? To 
know the truth, through and through. What are 
the ideals of religion ? The knowledge of God, of 
a soul that is to live forever, of a righteous life, 
of a kingdom of God in time : and what freedom 
and scope, what measureless ranges of being these 
ideals call into existence ! These interests make 
the intellect as free as the wings and the flight 
of a bird. " God hath put eternity in man's 
heart," says one of the writers in the Old Testa- 
ment ; Hegel used to say, that man is the child 
of the Infinite, and your hand-to-mouth philoso- 
phers can never adequately set out the glory of 
the intellectual toil of mankind. It is a poor thing 
to represent the intellect as a petty farmer, going 
to his hencoop in the morning for an egg for 
breakfast. At best that is only one side ; mere 
day, with its glare, its roar of activity, its sound- 
ing hammers of practicality give us only an as- 
pect. Night with its infinite splendors gives us 
the greatness of man and the greatness of his 
interests as a rational being. 

Finally, night is a discipline in trust. This uni- 
verse, revealed by night, is so vast that no man 
is able to master it and no man is wise enough 
to find his way home through all those uncharted 



74 BEVELATION AND THE IDEAL 

seas ; he must be guided, he must trust. He looks 
again and sees everything in perfect order through 
obedience to law; worlds upon worlds wheeled 
along the grooves of eternal harmony by the In- 
finite indwelling will, — and he comes back and 
asks himself, " If I think my wisest, if I love my 
purest, if I act my bravest and my best, will not 
that same Universal Spirit wheel me along the 
grooves of divine harmony and bring me safely 
at last to my goal ? " " Oh, night, and storm, and 
darkness, ye are wondrous strong ! " " Ye stars 
which are the poetry of heaven " ; so sings the poet ; 
the wildness, the beauty and the infinity of it all 
excite within us the longing to trust the good God. 
Trust the Infinite Will, plant your strength on 
that and rest your weary life there. For a rational 
being who loves life and who would not like to 
part with it, the highest reason, the best wisdom, 
the supreme piety is to trust God and see it all. 
Is not that what Browning says ? 

" Grow old along with me 1 
The best is yet to be. 



Youth shows but half ; trust God : see 
all, nor be afraid ! " 

Do your best and trust God to bring you 
home. 



I 



VI 

GREATNESS MEASURED BY THE IDEAL 

" For thou hast made him but little lower than God and crownest him 
with glory and honor." 

Ps. vm, 5. 

Probably a greater number of the greatest 
thoughts of mankind were never compressed in 
fewer words than in this truly wonderful psalm. 
Kant's two wonders are here : the starry heavens 
above and the moral law within ; Kant's two 
wonders are here, and infinitely more. The world 
of nature is here in all its amazing splendor and 
wild, living beauty. The world of God is here, 
sublime, tender, mysterious, incomprehensible. 
In between the world of nature and the world of 
God is set the world of man. Upon each of these 
worlds, brief though the psalm is, we find a sam- 
ple of the greatest thoughts that have occupied 
the mind of man. 

It is primarily with the world of man that we 
are concerned now, and probably in the extant 
records of our race there is no more daring con- 
fession than that contained in these words: 
" Thou hast made him but little lower than God 
and crownest him with glory and honor." In this 
psalm there are two tests of greatness. The first 



76 REVELATION AND THE IDEAL 

test is physical magnitude, in space, in time, in 
materia] might. The second test of greatness is 
intellectual and moral grandeur. According to 
the first test of greatness man falls and all faith 
with him, aU human hope, and the whole world 
of precious human things. According to the sec- 
ond test man rises, and the cosmos falls and with 
it all atheism, all inhumanity, all despair, all 
sorrow. Consider, then, seriously with me for a 
few moments these two tests of greatness. 

1. The first is the test of magnitude. This is 
presented in the psalm in three forms, with the 
utmost impressiveness and indeed with tremen- 
dous power. There is the universe in space ; look 
at it when the night is clear through the wonder 
of the Syrian atmosphere ; look at it when the 
night is clear through our own untroubled at- 
mosphere with the naked eye, and what a scene 
of wild, endless beauty it presents ; look at it 
through the astronomer's glass and bring upon 
your soul a yet greater amazement at those count- 
less blazing worlds and galaxies of worlds. Then 
turn and ask, what is man ? A speck of dust to 
a sun, a firefly to the star Sirius, a glowworm to 
the constellation of Orion. The organism, so mi- 
nute as to require the strongest microscope to be 
seen, has a greater physical magnitude, measured 
against the totality of the solar system than 
man measured against the universe in space ; so 



GREATNESS MEASURED BY THE IDEAL 11 

infinitesimal is man. Look at the universe in time ; 
all these blazing worlds in space have a history ; 
they began somewhere, at some time. Slowly 
through countless aeons they evolved and took 
shape and went from one stage of glory to an- 
other. Eeflect that all these worlds roll in time ; 
they all tell of time as inconceivably great. What 
is man here ? The tick of your watch measured 
against a million years is inexpressibly longer 
and more impressive than man's life of three- 
score years and ten measured against the whole 
breath of astronomic time ; so brief is man's day. 
Consider the might, the physical might of the 
universe in space and in time ; consider the power 
which gives balance to all these countless worlds, 
which keeps them in perfect order, in continuous 
movement, that lifts them from stage to stage 
of their glorious career. Think of the power that 
reveals itself at particular points, as in the tem- 
pest, as in the wild sea, as in the hurricane. 
What is man here ? The frailest leaf conceivable ! 
What is his puny power measured against all 
that ? It is not even the fly to the lion, the in- 
sect to the mastodon : it is a mere nothing in the 
presence of measureless physical might. 

If physical magnitude is the only test of great- 
ness, man and man's world become insignificant 
incidents in the evolution of the magnitudes of 
the universe in space and time ; man and his 



78 BEVELATION AND THE IDEAL 

world are here inconceivably petty and vain ; a 
mere mote in the sunbeam, a grain of sand to 
the globe. 

2. Turn now to the other test, the test of in- 
tellectual and moral grandeur. There is, first of 
all, thought ; space does not possess this mighty 
attribute ; it knows not its character nor its con- 
tents. Man's mind travels through the wilderness 
of shining worlds, measuring and weighing, reck- 
oning the distances, computing relations, predict- 
ing conjunctions ; it goes the master of ever 
greater fields of the universe in space and time. 
Which is the greater : the mighty, shining cos- 
mos that knows not itself, or the intellect of man 
that entertains an ideal of the complete compre- 
hension of the cosmos, and in following that ideal 
masters more and more of the contents of space 
and time every decade and every century. Which 
is the greater: the thoughtless cosmos or the 
wizard thinker and commander — man? There 
is no comparison here. The human intellect is in 
a class by itself; the universe in space and in 
time falls at man's feet as a servant in the pres- 
ence of a king. 

In the second place, look at love, the love that 
brings together stainless and chivalrous youth; 
the love that founds a genuine human home ; the 
love that creates fatherhood and motherhood ; the 
love that shapes the soul of a friend, that makes 



GBEATNESS MEASURED BY THE IDEAL 79 

a patriot, that produces a servant, a devotee of 
mankind, that gives us the royal, loving, trust- 
ful son of God in surrender to the Infinite Will, 
saying, " Thy will be done." Here is a feeling 
whose worth cannot be measured by physical 
magnitudes; here is something utterly distinct 
and separate from such magnitudes; it is in 
a category by itself ; your physical universe is 
unnumbered leagues beneath the starry feet of 
love. 

There is in the third place, character. A great 
character, resulting from the continuous vision 
of the truth, the continuous love of the truth 
and the continuous service of the truth; — a 
great, solemn, enduring, disinterested, steadfast 
character is the greatest thing we know. Look 
at the Lord Jesus. What is the universe in space 
and in time and in physical might measured 
against his spiritual intelligence, against his heart, 
against his character. The two values are simply 
incomparable ; the cosmos belongs in one cate- 
gory, the Lord Jesus belongs in another infinitely 
higher. He is the typical, the representative man 
whose intellect is in servitude to the truth, whose 
heart goes in a great tide after honor, whose wiU 
is the everlasting bondsman of the right. The 
humanity whose type is the Lord Jesus rises and 
takes its sovereignty over all the magnitudes of 
the material universe, in the name of its intellect 



80 REVELATION AND THE IDEAL 

and moral grandeur, in the name of the intel- 
lectual and moral grandeur of God. 

Two things I beg you to observe here. Man's 
ideal expresses man's nature, proclaims and antici- 
pates man's sovereignty over things however vast. 
Man's primary distinctions are these : a thinker 
in the interest of the truth, a lover steadfast in 
the interest of the kingdom of honor, a servant 
joyous and faithful in the city of God. These 
distinctions of man's nature are reflected in man's 
ideal ; that ideal I repeat brings into impressive 
clearness man's sovereign value. If he loses the 
vision of the truth and the love of it and the de- 
sire and purpose to serve it, he becomes a thing, 
a mere creature ; he may as weU be a fish in the 
sea of which the psalmist speaks, or a fowl of the 
air, or a beast in the field; he is not a proper 
human being, Man's proper manhood is in his 
ideal of truth, love, and service. 

Will you observe that what is ideal in man is 
eternal reality in God ? " O Lord, our Lord, how 
excellent is thy name in all the earth." Why? 
Because his mind is truth, his heart is love, his 
will is eternal right. God's attributes appeal 
irresistibly to the soul — his intelligence to man's 
intelligence, his moral grandeur to man's con- 
science. He has made man a little lower than 
God; he calls to the ideal humanity of man by 
the whole splendor of his real Godhead. 



GREATNESS MEASURED BY THE IDEAL 81 

The rank of God, as the head of the universe, 
depends upon his infinite being, infinite in power 
and worth. In God quantity of being and excel- 
lence unite to constitute his supreme and ineffable 
existence. For all created things and beings rank 
is determined not by quantity but by quality, 
not by bulk but by intelligence, not by the flesh 
but by the spirit. 

What are the highest values to God in this 
universe of his ? That question goes to the heart 
of all faith and all life. The greatness of this 
wonderful psalm from which the text is taken is 
in its answer to the question. What does God 
place next Himself in value ? Not the heavens, 
not the sun, the moon and the stars ; but the in- 
tellect and soul of man. Man is for God in this 
boundless and amazing universe the sovereign 
value. In God's esteem man stands only a little 
lower than God. 

What does the true man, great in possessions, 
place next to himself? His home in the country 
or city, his wealth, the agents of his power or 
pleasure, or his child? That frail child stands 
close against his heart ; immeasurably below that 
child rank aU his possessions. 

Here is the glory of our Christian faith. 
"Our Father, who art in heaven"; that is the 
fundamental assumption ; that is the bedrock 
on which Jesus builds his kingdom. God's per- 



82 BEVELATION AND THE IDEAL 

spective of values is the perspective of the In- 
finite Father. The mother, with the infant in 
her arms, looking out upon the boundless starlit 
universe, awestruck by the sense of its wildness 
and vastness, yet feeling that her child is infin- 
itely more precious than the countless cosmic 
splendors upon which she is gazing, is the human 
parable of God's heart. The Sistine Madonna 
pictures the soul of the Gospel. There is the 
Divine Child, divinely beautiful, but frail, inex- 
pressibly frail. There is the mother, holding her 
child with a sense of her infinite treasure, with 
the sense, too, of the terrible forces that may tear 
that child from her arms. The mother's sense of 
the worth, the unutterable worth of her child is 
again the human parable of God's attitude to- 
ward man. As the Madonna feels toward the 
Divine Child, so Jesus felt toward mankind ; as 
Jesus felt toward mankind, so God feels; he 
ranks next himself not the universe of things, 
but the little world of man. "Fear not, little 
flock ; it is your Father's good pleasure to give 
you the kingdom." The estimates of God, inter- 
preted by the estimates of the human heart, in- 
terpreted by the estimates of the heart of our 
Lord Jesus ; this, I repeat, is the inmost sanc- 
tuary of our faith. 

"Above the heavens " ; these are the great words 
of faith. The Eternal Mind is above all; the 



GREATNESS MEASURED BY THE IDEAL 83 

beings made in the image of the Eternal are also 
above the heavens, above all things in space and 
time, as a value to God, above the whole material 
universe. When heart and flesh fail, it is not be- 
cause we are crushed, the higher by the lower, 
the rational by the irrational, the spiritual by 
mere brute matter ; when we fail and die it is by 
the order of the Eternal good will. Our bereave- 
ment is in the plan of God for us ; our sorrow is 
his austere kindness ; our death is the call of the 
Infinite Mind to the finite mind to enter into 
closer communion with him. Things, events, 
changes, experiences, dissolutions are but the 
agents of the Mind whose glory is above the 
heavens. Across the wild dance and mad whirl 
of this time-world we catch the flying song of 
faith and we send its sure triumphant notes back 
over the boundless domain of apparent hostility 
to man : " If God is for us who is against us?" 
We believe that the sovereign things in the uni- 
verse are God's mind, God's heart, God's char- 
acter; we believe that the sovereign values in 
time are not physical magnitudes and powers, 
but truth, love, and good will expressed in serv- 
ice. Above the heavens is the glory of God; 
above the heavens, in life and in death, is the 
value of man. 



VII 
THE MYSTIC AND HIS IDEAL 

" And Enoch walked with Ood." 

Gen. V, 24. 

You recall that supremely beautiful incident in 
the Gospel according to Luke,the walk to Emmaus. 
Two disciples of the crucified Jesus left Jerusa- 
lem for the village of Emmaus. They were over- 
come with sorrow over the loss of their Master. 
Their lives, their people, their world seemed to 
them wrapt in hopeless gloom. Sad at heart and 
yet able to speak their sorrow to one another 
they journeyed onward. As they went, a myste- 
rious stranger joined them ; he drew from them a 
full confession of the cause of their grief ; he 
showed them how foolish that grief was. He 
captivated them with the majesty and tenderness 
of his spirit, and at the journey's end while their 
hearts burned under his power he went in to 
abide with them. In the breaking of bread that 
followed he was revealed to them and after this 
revelation the cloud of mystery again concealed 
him. 

This is the New Testament parallel to the 
story in the text. The New Testament story is 



THE MYSTIC AND HIS IDEAL 85 

richer, more tender, more intense and human than 
that in the text; it is closer to our sympathies, 
with a more potent appeal to imagination. Still 
the best commentary on the meaning of the words, 
" Enoch walked with God," is found in the jour- 
ney of those disciples from Jerusalem to Emmaus 
in the unconscious but enfolding presence of the 
Kisen Lord. 

It is, indeed, possible that we read Christian 
meanings into these primitive words, "Enoch 
walked with God." It may be that we should 
picture a child's idea of God and a child's idea 
of man's fellowship with God. It may be that 
for this primitive soul God was simply another 
and greater man ; God's soul was in a body as 
Enoch's soul was in a body; each saw the other, 
each heard the other, each took the other by 
the hand, and on his way through the years 
Enoch took his daily walk with God. 

Since we cannot settle the question of how 
much of our own best thought we can surely 
find in primitive words, it is safest to take them 
in the way of parable. We may read into old 
words more than they originally contained ; we 
may find in them much less than was in them at 
the beginning. The danger of under-estimation 
is quite as great as that of over-estimation, and 
under-estimation is a mean mistake. If we take 
the words of the text in the way of parable, we 



86 REVELATION AND THE IDEAL 

shall see in them a path of revelation over which 
have come many of the mightiest spirits and also 
a multitude of lowly souls. 

The mystic is one who sees all things in God. 
Sensuous vision beholds all things in space, in- 
finite space. The homes of men are there, the 
cities of men, the trade of men by land and sea ; 
all living things are in space. Our pendant world 
is in space ; the sun and the planets are there 
and the countless host of stars ; everything that 
can be seen or heard or felt has its place in this 
mystery of all-containing space. 

In the Eternal Spirit, all things, all events, 
all beings have their place. The material imiverse 
is one aspect of the Infinite Spirit ; the world of 
intelligence is another aspect. The soul of man 
looks inward and beholds the subtle, elusive, 
mysterious, pervasive, all-containing God, as the 
eye looks outward and sees the universal wonder 
of space. For the mystic the universe, cosmic and 
human, is the perpetual apocalypse of God. The 
universe lives and moves and has its being in 
God. He is in immediate and continuous presen- 
tation to the mystical soul ; He is the ideal truth, 
beauty, goodness, and blessedness of all worlds ; 
He is the king immortal and invisible whom the 
eye of the soul may habitually behold. His pres- 
ence in human existence is the source of aU our 
standards of right, of all our measures of love. 



THE MYSTIC AND HIS IDEAL 87 

of all our experiences of power, of all our hopes 
of complete moral being. Again He is like space, 
infinite space. He provides room in his own life 
for all ; He is the elusive and yet essential con- 
dition of all finite life ; we breathe and continue 
to live, we cease to breathe the blessed air and 
we die. By the inspirations of the Almighty we 
exist and become self-conscious souls and men of 
understanding heart. The mystic looks and finds 
God the container of all ; the mystic lives and 
behold God is the life of his life ; the mystic is 
radiant with joy and behold God is the eternal 
fountain of his blessedness ; the mystic faces the 
future undismayed and in serene confidence, and 
again God is the ground of his hope. 

1. With the process of the suns so many in- 
termediaries by way of aids to the spirit appear 
between the soul and God that we need to be 
led by the mystic to the open, face to face, un- 
mediated and habitual vision of the Eternal 
Goodness. The mystic is the child-seer among 
the prophets. Every normal child looks upon 
nature in its original character before science 
has said this of it, before art has said that of it, 
before religion has given it a new name. There 
the child stands looking upon nature not through 
scientific, artistic, or religious notions, but through 
its own eyes of wonder and awe. There is the un- 
biased mind looking upon the naked majesty and 



88 REVELATION AND THE IDEAL 

beauty of the world. So the mystic looks upon 
God. All sacred books, all sacred persons, all 
sacred institutions, all creeds and rituals are for 
the moment turned aside. Nothing intervenes 
between the mystical soul and the ever-present, 
all-searching, mysterious, all-blessed God. The 
Eternal Spirit and the spirit in man, each aware 
of the other's presence, each in dialogue with 
the other, — there is the aboriginal beginning of 
all revelation. 

The mystic conducts us to this beginning as 
one might turn the vision of a multitude to the 
east at sunrise. There the wonder begins ; there 
the wonder is repeated every day ; there is no 
point at which the sun breaks into the world 
other than the east ; there is no point at which 
God comes into the life of men other than 
through the soul in the vision of Him. All our 
records of sunrise are of yesterdays ; they are of 
the glory that was, of the light that is gone. 
Good it may be to read these records, they may 
purify present vision, enlarge and enrich the 
power of seeing, but they are secondary and not 
primary ; we seek the sunrise and not the records 
of sunrise. All our sacred books are of the 
God who was, of the splendor that appeared to 
other souls, of the tender mercy that made other 
lives bearable and beautiful. They are precious, 
they cleanse and enlarge the eye of the spirit ; 



THE MYSTIC AND HIS IDEAL 89 

they set our needs and our privileges in the atmos- 
phere of the noblest humanity ; but they are in- 
strumental and not final, they are the telescope 
and not the star. We seek not the report of God in 
the speech of men, but God Himself, the living 
God. We must behold for ourselves the Eternal 
Wonder and live in the awe and hope of his dis- 
covered and glorious Presence. 

2. The mystic is one who shows us that light 
is for life ; God is light, but the light is in the 
high service of the moral being of man. This 
Old Testament mystic refused to believe that he 
was a mere creature of sense and time, that the 
purpose of his existence was to eat and drink 
and to-morrow to die. His spirit rose within 
him to the recognition of God as the Alpha and 
Omega of all being and the indispensable grace 
and power in his life. The being of God was the 
clearest, the surest, and at the same time the 
most influential possession of his intelligence. 
The thought of God spread through his whole 
existence like light revealing all, transfiguring 
all ; like some rare perfume adding new richness 
to all ; like music filling his soul with heavenly 
melody ; like the beauty of the world ; like a 
vast and unretuming tide of love. The primacy 
of God in the thought of this man meant the 
constant approach of his soul toward the beauty 
of the Lord our God. 



90 REVELATION AND THE IDEAL 

Is there nothing for us in this solemn asser- 
tion of the awful primacy of God ? It is said 
elsewhere in Scripture of a certain type of man, 
" God is not in all his thoughts ! " What sort 
of man will oblivion of God produce ? 

Here is a son, and his father is not in all his 
thoughts ; his mother is not in all his feelings ; 
he is oblivious of the fact that he has a father 
or that he has a mother. How will the great 
filial relation fare in that boy's life? Another 
man is a servant ; the fact that he is a servant 
is never in his thoughts ; that he is employed 
and paid by some one to work for him is never 
in his thoughts. What kind of a workman will 
that man make? Another still is an employer 
in whose thoughts there are no images of the 
men whom he hires, who work his will, and who 
carry out his plans. What sort of an employer 
of human beings will that man make? Yonder 
is a friend who thinks much of the joy, the fas- 
cination, the passion of friendship, but who 
thinks nothing of the great world of obligation 
that comes out of the heart of friendship. There 
is an American citizen in whose thought the 
country never is, in whose feeling it never casts 
an image, whose past is of no consequence to 
him, for whose present he has no regard, for 
whose future he has no care. What kind of a 
citizen will that man make? By your side is 



THE MYSTIC AND HIS IDEAL 91 

a man who never thinks that he is a man, who 
Kves in oblivion of humanity. I ask again, what 
kind of character will oblivion of the great or- 
ganic relations of society produce ? The answer 
must be a worthless son, a worthless servant, a 
brutal employer, a wretched friend, a miserable 
citizen, a contemptible man. 

Consider how this oblivion of God works, ob- 
livion of Him in whom we " live and move and 
have our being," upon whom we are dependent 
for every breath that we draw. What sort of a 
character is he in whose mind that sovereign re- 
lation has no image of its sovereignty ? Give me 
the son whose mind and heart are forever en- 
riched with the image of his parent ; give me 
the servant whose conscience holds the contract 
that he has made with his master ; give me the 
employer whose conscience holds the contract 
that he has made with those whom he has em- 
ployed ; give me the friend who enjoys friendship 
and yet feels its awe and power ; give me the 
citizen who is a citizen not merely in imagination 
and feeling, but also in and through the moral 
nature that he wears ; give me the man who re- 
joices in his humanity ; give me the soul that be- 
lieves in God, in whose nature God is first. There 
is a human being under the sovereignty of the 
Highest ; there is one whose vision of God is 
the supreme practical influence in his existetice ; 



92 REVELATION AND THE IDEAL 

there is the man among men who at the same 
time is a man of God. 

3. The mystic is one whose chief joy is in 
God. The purest delight in life and the most 
abundant for the mystical soul is the delight in 
the Eternal Lover of men. For all those who 
have seen the King in his beauty the vision has 
become the chief joy of existence. They all sing 
with Faber : — 

« The thought of God, the thought of Thee, 
Who liest in my heart, 
And yet heyond imagined space 
Outstretched and present art, — 
The thought of Thee above, below, 
Around me and within, 
Is more to me than health and wealth 
Or love of kith or kin." 

The high capacity for delight in the God 
and Father of Jesus is in every soul. We read 
the universal latent capacity in great realization 
in the life of the Lord. Jesus' life was the busiest 
and the most crowded of any life on record, and 
yet in and through the stream of multitudinous 
care and activity there went the swift and constant 
and glorious presence of his Father. If there is 
anything in the farewell discourse of Jesus to 
his disciples, then the lover of God becomes the 
host of God, for Jesus says that those who love 
the Father come to entertain the Father. We 
confess this truth in our prayer when we do 



THE MYSTIC AND HIS IDEAL 93 

pray ; when we stop mere mumbling, when we 
lift ourselves out of conventions, when our whole 
nature rises to speak to God ; we know then that 
communion with God means joy and that it is 
the very heart of existence. When we are driven 
to God by some great temptation, by some heavy 
burden, by some stern sorrow, by some awful 
fear, then we know how true it is that a man can 
speak with God as he speaks with his friends 
and feel the passage as of lightning back and 
forth between the mind of the Infinite and his 
own soul. Then again we are in the cleft of the 
rock and see his goodness sweep by ; once more 
He is our pillar of fire by night and our pillar 
of cloud by day, and the joy of the Lord is our 
strength. 

It is at this point that we discover the mournful 
poverty of our religious experience. How seldom 
we think of our heavenly Father and how sel- 
dom as joy. How infrequently we lift our thought 
to the Eternal and sun ourselves in his supreme 
compassion ! How infrequent our effort to live 
by his wisdom translated into our own thought, 
to go in the strength of his passionate and infi- 
nite love operating through our hearts, and to 
rest in the great power of his will. How infre- 
quent! The poor dweller, dull and heavy, in 
Zermatt, thinks he knows aU about his little vil- 
lage set in among those incomparable mountains. 



94 REVELATION AND TEE IDEAL 

What a surprise he would get if he could look 
at his little world from the summit of the Mat- 
terhorn ; he would hardly know it as the same 
/ world. We walk the earth deadened under cus- 
tom ; we think we know all about ourselves, all 
about our neighbors, all about the world of 
men and the ways of men. If we were only taken 
up into the elevations of God, then we should 
confess that we never knew ourselves, that we 
never knew our brothers, that we never knew 
anything great about our human world ; then 
we should see the piled up and everlasting sub- 
limities of our nature, the towering, austere 
image of God in the souls of men ; we should 
see and we should rejoice. 

4. The mystic is strong through the appro- 
bation of God ; his heart is full of the peace that 
God gives to those who do their work in his 
sight. The love of approbation finds its true 
goal in God. When the miserable politician 
listens for the praise of the brutal and the igno- 
rant, we say that mood is base. When we see 
Washington listening for the approval of the 
wisest and the best of his own time, listening 
for the approval of the wisest and best in all 
ages of American national existence, we see how 
indispensable to a great and good servant is 
the love of approbation. The praise of a wise 
and noble father is sweet ; the praise of a just 



THE MYSTIC AND HIS IDEAL 95 

and discerning mother is a joy ; the praise of 
a conscientious teacher is a new happiness ; the 
praise of those for whom we honestly and worth- 
ily work is a great delight ! The good will and 
approbation of our neighbors is a fountain of 
satisfaction, and fame when it comes to any one, 
is invigorating as the symbol of the approving 
judgment, the kindly feeling, and the grateful 
heart of mankind. 

This ladder of approbation set on the earth, 
set down by the very cradle, reaches to heaven. 
When He, before whom all thoughts are open 
and from whom no secrets are hid, when He, 
seeing the ideal of our life, and the movement 
of our life, bears witness with our souls that, not- 
withstanding all failures and all weaknesses and 
all defects, we are well-pleasing in his sight, we 
gain the sovereign satisfaction, the sovereign 
strength of mortal life. 

I often think there is no strength in us till 
our consciences repeat the approving notes of the 
Eternal Conscience. We have to stand up against 
so much, we have to contradict our friends, we 
have to make our way through the world by the 
narrow path that God appoints, and we cannot 
do it unless the poor feeble conscience within 
hears the " Well done " and repeats the appro- 
bation of the great God on high. 

The reason why men have flung their lives 



96 REVELATION AND THE IDEAL 

away in the service of the great causes of the 
world is here ; they had witness borne them that 
in the ideal and movement of their life they were 
well-pleasing to God. You cannot abolish the 
man through whom has gone the approving con- 
science of the Most High. 

Thus it was that the old mystic made no ac- 
count of death. We may not be able to say what 
death meant to him, but we are sure from the 
story that it was of small account, a mere inci- 
dent in his career. He was sure of God, he was 
in steady and happy communion with God; in 
the ideal and direction of his life he had ringing 
in his heart the music of God's approval ; and 
in consequence of these things death was but a 
shadow ; he sailed through it as easily as the ship 
steams through a belt of fog. 

I remember well the last walk that I took in 
my native land before I sailed for the Western 
world more than forty years ago. It was on one 
of the longest and brightest days in June. I had 
said good-bye to dear friends and my solitary 
path for ten miles lay through peaceful and fruit- 
ful farms and over the ridge of a mountain whose 
shapely summit had looked down upon the com- 
ing and going of immemorial generations of men. 
Then followed a long stretch of moor, barren, 
dismal, whose heather would in three months 
bloom again and fade like the hopes in the hearts 



THE MYSTIC AND HIS IDEAL 97 

of poor human beings. As I struck the moor, the 
sun was setting. The lonely way lay in the great 
transfiguring radiance. It became a path of 
beauty and infinite tender suggestion ; a heavenly 
meaning seemed to beat in the boundless glow ; 
a sense of companionship, not understood then, 
settled in the heart, delight took the place of 
loneliness, and the journey that thus lay in the 
path of the setting sun I could not wish to end. 
More than forty years have come and gone 
since then. Farewells have been spoken to many 
friends for the last time on earth. The journey 
has been through much of the beauty of the 
world, and still the way has been over hill and 
moor, crag and torrent. The pilgrimage has often 
seemed a type of the lonely and sorrowful migra- 
tion of man from the shadows of morning to the 
gloom of the evening. The happiest experiences 
have not deafened me to the still sad music of 
humanity ; the evanescence of all things earthly 
has been a constant refrain in my spirit. Despair 
and utter heart-break would long ago have undone 
my days if nothing heavenly had been found to 
glorify and comfort and protect the precious bur- 
den of human love. " The light that never was 
on sea or land " enfolds the way of every pil- 
grim. He is traveling in the glow that falls upon 
time from the Eternal ; his path is in the trans- 
figuring presence of the Infinite Love; he has 



98 BEVEL ATION AND THE IDEAL 

but to ponder the meaning of the delight that 
has come to him, the strength that has been 
given him, the thankfulness, the peace and the 
hope that have entered his spirit, to know that 
he is walking with God. 

" Who would stop, or fear to advance. 
Though home or shelter he had none, 
With such a sky to lead him on? " 



VIII 
THE IDEALIST AS PIONEER 

" Now the Lord said unto Abram, Get thee out of thy country, and from 
thy kindred, and from thy father's house, unto a land that I will show 
thee." 

Gen. xn, 1. 

Our first impression on reading these words 
is that here we have to do with an extraordinary 
man. We have come upon one of the turning- 
points in the fortunes of mankind. Here is a 
character of great originality. Here is one who 
is to found a new nation, who is to inaugurate a 
new era in human civilization, who is to write 
the first chapter in a new volume of human his- 
tory, one whose influence and genius are to pene- 
trate to the final chapter in that volume. 

Our second impression on reading these words 
is that there is something of universal applica- 
tion in them, something in them suited to the 
life of every man ; for sooner or later every 
generation arrives at the hour in which it finds 
these words ringing in its ear, " Get thee out of 
thy country, and from thy kindred, and from thy 
father's house, unto a land that I will show thee.'* 

Examples are abundant and near at hand. 
There is the son of privilege who must give 



100 REVELATION AND THE IDEAL 

account of himself to the public conscience ; the 
member of a large family harassed with poverty 
who while only a boy must go forth to earn his 
own living ; the child of a devout home who has 
been trained in the most careful way, defended 
against temptation, shielded from all evil, who 
now that he has become a man must do battle 
for himself against the world and stand or fall 
by the might. of his own arm. Nearer still to our 
subject is the person whose ancestry has been a 
deteriorating ancestry. The hour arrives when 
this man feels that if the descent of his line is to 
be discontinued, he must become an Abram and 
renounce his past. For one reason or another, 
therefore, all serious persons on arriving at man- 
hood are met with the austere imperative, " Get 
thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, 
and from thy father's house, unto a land that I 
will show thee." To millions of our fellow-citizens 
that imperative came ; they are here because they 
were moved by a divine intimation and a vast 
hope ; their first great type in the Old Testament 
is this fascinating man Abraham. 

Abraham was a mighty idealist ; he was an 
illustrious pioneer among idealists; and in order 
that we may gain some sense of his value in the 
evolution of revelation I shall ask and try to 
answer several definite questions. 

1. What do we mean by an idealist? We use 



THE IDEALIST AS PIONEER 101 

the word continually and not always with a clear 
and sure sense of its significance. Let us try to 
attach to our use of it a fixed and intelligible 
meaning. In a general way we may say that the 
idealist is one who is dissatisfied with the world 
as it is, and who has a vision of a better world 
that may be. He is one who has drawn an indict- 
ment, an enlightened and wise indictment, against 
the world as it stands, and who has framed a 
wise, enlightened programme for the world as it 
should be. He is one who is sick at heart over 
the falsehood, the iniquity and the inhumanity 
in the world as it is, and who lives in a great 
and splendid vision of a new heaven and a new 
earth wherein dwelleth righteousness. All men 
are idealists who are dissatisfied with the world 
as it is, and who have a definite picture of what 
they would like the world to be. All men are 
wise idealists who from honest and adequate in- 
sight are dissatisfied with the world as it is, who 
from honest and adequate insight discern what 
the world ought to be. 

Two examples will, I hope, add clearness to 
this general statement. Till the middle of the 
last century British opinion about Oliver Crom- 
well was generally expressed in these rather un- 
complimentary terms, "regicide," "hypocrite," 
"universal villain." Abuse almost unlimited had 
been heaped upon Cromwell for two centuries. 



102 BEVELATION AND THE IDEAL 

That was the opinion of the world when Carlyle 
began to write. He was dissatisfied with that 
world of opinion upon that subject ; he protested 
against it; he dug up those speeches and those 
letters ; he pondered them, poured out his soul in 
the study of them, and finally brought out a book 
containing a vision of Oliver Cromwell, as liber- 
ator, as governor in the interests of the people, as 
the greatest statesman and ruler that England ever 
had — one of the heroes of the world ! Here is an 
example of the idealist : dissatisfaction grounded 
upon knowledge, vision of what the world of 
opinion should be on that particular subject. 

The greatest monument of idealism in the an- 
cient world is the "Kepublic" of Plato. This 
monumental book is rich in thought, splendid in 
imagination, glorious in style; it teems with va- 
rious wisdom ; its heart beats with great hopes. 
What are the two essential characteristics of 
that wonderful book ? They are the great think- 
er's indictment against the Greek world of his 
time and his vision of what that Greek world 
might become. An idealist, then, is one who is 
dissatisfied with the world as it stands, and who 
entertains a vision of the better future. 

2. The second question is. What do we mean 
by a " Pioneer Idealist " ? One who is the first, 
or among the first, to feel dissatisfaction with the 
treatment which some great human interest has 



THE IDEALIST AS PIONEER 103 

hitherto received and who entertains for that 
particular human interest a great hope. Stephen 
is the first Christian martyr, he is the pioneer 
Christian martyr. He was the first to protest 
against that old world of the Jew that had 
crushed Jesus out of existence. He was the first 
to give his life for the new world which he wished 
to put in the place of the old. There is the pio- 
neer missionary, Paul, who went everywhere 
throughout the Roman Empire, protesting against 
the empire as it was, with a programme for the 
empire as it should be ; he was the first, and he 
was a pioneer because he was first. There are 
the pioneer reformers, Wyclif in England, Sav- 
onarola in Florence, Huss in Bohemia, Knox in 
Scotland; each of these men is an idealist because 
a protestant against the reigning conditions of 
the time, because carrying a definite programme 
to these various peoples; each is a pioneer be- 
cause first in that service. There is the pioneer 
philanthropist, — Garrison, Wendell Phillips, 
Love joy, and Henry Ward Beecher were such ; 
and greatest of them all, that incomparable wo- 
man genius of America, Harriet Beecher Stowe. 
These were idealists because they uttered a pro- 
test against the country as it was, because they 
had a definite programme for the country ; and 
they were pioneers because they were in the van- 
guard of a mighty army. 



104 BEVELATION AND THE IDEAL 

Early in the last century a scholar came to 
Andover Seminary whose name was Moses Stu- 
art. He has been called the father of Biblical 
learning in this country. Why was he so called ? 
Because he felt the meagreness and the misera- 
bleness of Biblical scholarship reigning in the 
America of his time ; because he protested against 
it and because he entertained a vision of better 
things to come ; and he was pioneer because he 
was first, or among the first. Robinson sustained 
the same relation to the Presbyterians, Hackett 
to the Baptists, Ezra Abbot, the greatest scholar 
of them all, to the Unitarians. 

A new form of this pioneer idealism has lately 
sprung up in the world. Scholars in Germany, 
in Great Britain, and among ourselves are dis- 
satisfied with the vague, indefinite, inaccurate 
knowledge of Christendom concerning the Bible. 
They have formed an idea of the Bible as the 
product of different times, as coming up out of 
certain circumstances and conditions and written 
by certain men, and they wish to see the Bible 
as it rose up out of the life of a great race, and 
present that process and result to the world. 
These men are idealists, and they are pioneer 
idealists, because they are the first in a great 
movement. 

The dwellers in the valleys look to the tops 
of the highest mountains for the earliest tokens 



THE IDEALIST AS PIONEER 105 

of sunrise. In the valley of Zermatt, long before 
the light of the morning sun can be elsewhere 
seen, it may be noted in the fiery glow that 
touches and colors the Matterhorn. The same is 
true of the revelation that comes by the path of 
the ideal. The loftiest soul first catches the fire 
of God's presence ; the nature that towers above 
the lowlands first receives the glowing vision; 
the human being who in himself lifts the race to 
unwonted heights takes in splendor the protest 
and programme from the Infinite Love and cheers 
the multitude of humbler spirits in the valleys 
of existence with glorious assurances of the com- 
ing day. 

3. Our third question concerns the significance 
of this man, Abraham. First of all this man is 
significant to Israelites, — he is their common 
ancestor. I know many say that he never existed, 
— with me that skepticism does not count. Many 
say that God does not exist ; that unbelief does 
not touch the divine reality. Abraham is the 
headwaters, so to speak, of the river of Hebrew 
existence. He is significant to Mohammedans as 
the earliest prophet of their faith, as Mohammed 
is the latest. He is significant to Christians as 
the first forerunner of Jesus ; " Abraham saw my 
day and was glad." He is significant to all who 
have conducted great migrations, among them 
the Pilgrims and the Puritans who came to this 



106 REVELATION AND THE IDEAL 

country ; they, too, went out not knowing whither 
they went. He is significant to college men, 
making a great start; to young men going into 
business, moving out of the quiet harbor upon a 
serious career; to lovers about to found their new 
home; to all beginners in all lines of life. He is 
significant because he is a great beginner and 
because he began in the power of an idea. He 
began, and he began in the might of a great 
conception ! 

We must further consider the balance of forces 
in this man's composition. We must believe that 
he was a genuine conservative. He knew that 
other men had preceded him, as sincere and 
honest as he. He knew that these men had dis- 
covered something through their lives. He knew 
that there lay behind him an accumulation of 
good which it behooved him not to neglect and 
not to underestimate, and, therefore, like a true 
conservative, he took with him all that he con- 
sidered worthy in the past. He took with him 
his sense of kindred, his sense of the value of 
home, his sense of love, his consciousness of God. 
He took a vast bequest out of the confused but 
noble past into his soul, and, with that treasure 
from the past, he turned his face toward the 
future. 

This is a lesson which we need emphatically to 
remember. The world is new in so many aspects ; 



THE IDEALIST AS PIONEER 107 

men are standing tiptoe with expectation every 
morning, putting tlie ear to the ground every 
evening to catch the sound of coming feet. At 
such a time it behooves us to look backward, to 
remember that behind us there is an immeasur- 
able history of discovery, of accumulated wisdom, 
accumulated good ; it is our duty to remember 
that a special ancestry is behind every one of us, 
with much good in it that should be conserved ; 
that there are traditions about home and busi- 
ness and national life that should be carried for- 
ward ; that there are whole worlds of high in- 
sight, sound sentiment, great character and 
splendid achievement, all lying in the past, which 
we need to know and which we need to possess 
and take with us into the promised land of our 
personal future. 

I often think as I pass the Public Library in 
Boston's beautiful square of the vast treasures 
contained within those four noble walls. Think of 
the high thought, the profound and serious feel- 
ing, the great lives that have been lived and the 
great achievements that have been wrought re- 
corded there. The Public Library is the monu- 
ment of the past. It is mainly a massive token 
of the obligation of the living to the dead. It is 
mainly a eulogy upon the intelligence, the feel- 
ing, the character, and the achievement of the 
generations that have gone. Think of the great 



108 REVELATION AND THE IDEAL 

books there along any line of interest ; they come 
from the past. How vast, how beautiful, how 
affluent, how majestic, how rewarding to the stu- 
dious mind is that past. Is there any one more 
foolish than he who turns his back upon all this 
in the frenzy of self-sufficiency ? You see the 
great breaker that comes with its white crest 
rolling in upon the beach. How fine it is ! It is 
the vanguard of the incoming tide, but wherein 
lies the explanation of its career? It is in the 
momentum of the sea behind it. It would not 
come, it would not rise, it would not break, it 
would not creep up the beach, if it were not for 
the roll and swell of the mighty sea behind it ; 
and our farthest reach to-day is chiefly because 
of the sweU of the humanity that is behind us. 

This true conservative was also a true radical. 
He faced toward the future. He was the holder 
of a growing ideal ; not like the fixed gas-jet, but 
like the light that was to grow into a great star. 
He was the holder of a growing mind, a deepen- 
ing heart, a greatening character. He was on his 
way to something greater than he had ever seen 
or been. All that went before was helping him to 
go beyond himself. 

We are not here merely to repeat what has 
gone before, to say over again the same old story 
that has been said from the beginning. We are 
here to understand the accumulated vision of the 



I 



THE IDEALIST AS PIONEER 109 

world more deeply, more clearly, more vitally ; 
for this is what we mean by originality. Intellec- 
tual originality, originality of mind, means to 
understand the old subject more deeply, more 
adequately, to see further into it, because almost 
all subjects have been discussed in one way or 
another, but every subject waits for a profounder 
and a more adequate discussion. In the more 
adequate insight and comprehension there is 
room for the play of the best kind of originality. 
There is, too, originality of feeling. There are 
some people that are on the outside of everything. 
They are on the outside of their friends ; they 
are on the outside of the subjects in which they 
deal ; they are outside people. There are others 
that search the world with their heart, just as 
the sea comes in and every spongy substance 
along the beach is filled with its great searching 
tide. That is originality of feeling, the power 
that wins admission for us into the soul of the 
world. There is originality of character ; it lies 
in the power to make things take a new turn, 
to inaugurate great changes. Such a man was 
Washington. He was not original in mind, he 
was not original in feeling, but he was original 
in character. 

We may have new insights all the way home. 
I do not know anything better to hope for than 
that. It is like the coming of a beautiful bird to 



I 

110 REVELATION AND THE IDEAL 

one on a lonely walk, alighting on a tree just 
ahead, and singing its joyous song. These new 
insights we should expect all the way, and a 
greater power to enter into the feelings and the 
soul of man. The difference between the man of 
genius and the ordinary person is here perhaps 
as much as anywhere. You think of the man 
who wrote the Book of Job. He was an indi- 
vidual, yet he comprehended the sorrow of a 
whole race. His heart beat with the heartache 
of the whole world of his time. When you read 
Shakespeare, you feel that here is a man who 
understands you as you never understood your- 
self. He enters your feelings, he sounds your 
heart, he knows your existence. 

The negative aspect of the genuine radical is 
only the first step. He must ponder the great 
words, " Get thee out,''^ but we must not stop 
there. We must listen to the whole august im- 
perative ; " Get thee out of thy country ; and 
from thy kindred, and thy father's house, unto a 
land that I will show thee." Break with evil at 
once ; break with your whole past in so far as it 
has been wicked ; break with its falsehood, its in- 
justice, its inhumanity, its shame ; break with the 
inadequate, but do so in the name of the ideal 
future. Your work is only begun in renuncia- 
tion ; it must go on to the vaster vision, the pro- 
founder and purer passion, the greater and love- 



I 



THE IDEALIST AS PIONEER 111 

lier character, the richer and surer social good. 
The perpetual renunciation of the incomplete; 
the perpetual pilgrimage toward the ideal fu- 
ture ; here is the inmost history of every truly 
religious soul. Ur of the Chaldees we must leave 
every morning; toward the land of Promise we 
must travel while the light of the day lasts ; and 
in the evening, however far we may have come, 
we must pitch our tent knowing well that we 
must move again at daybreak. 

You recall the words of the beloved disciple 
who looked upon the past with unspeakable 
gratitude, " Behold what manner of love the 
Father hath bestowed upon us that we should 
be called the Sons of God, and such we are." 
Was he satisfied with that glorious retrospect? 
No. He turned toward the future and sang, " It 
doth not yet appear what we shall be, but we 
know that when He shall be made manifest, we 
shall be like Him, for we shall see Him as He is." 

When Paul came to the end of his career, he 
looked back and said like a man, " I have fought 
the beautiful fight, I have kept the faith, I have 
run the race." Was he satisfied with this career 
which God had made possible for him, a career 
of great achievement, with the victory won in 
the race, in the faith, and in the fight? No. He 
looked forward : " Henceforth, there is laid up 
for me the crown of righteousness." 



112 REVELATION AND THE IDEAL 

Let us go forth, one and all, with our constel- 
lation of ideals over our heads. Let them rain 
down their sweet influences upon us, sweeter 
than the influences of the Pleiades. Let us look 
backward in veneration, remembering how vast 
and majestic the past is ; but let our pilgrimage 
be onward ; let our goal be the city of God. 



IX 
THE MILITANT IDEALIST 

« And he said, I will not let thee go except thou bless me." 

Gen. xxxn, 26. 

Somehow there has come into our time a new 
sense of the value of man. He has become a new 
object of concern, a chief field of study, a larger 
inspiration to hope. As we consider man differ- 
ent aspects of his greatness appeal to us. Now 
it is the elevation of his soul rising as it does 
from the levels of the animal order ; again, it is 
his distinction in knowledge, in art, in achieve- 
ment ; still again, it is his proud position as the 
consummate expression of the life on this planet, 
— his strength, his courage, his defiance; once 
more, it is his loneliness as he stands against the 
far-distant, dumb eternal background; and last 
and highest of all, it is the aspect of his nature 
brought before us in the text, his appeal to the 
Infinite, his power over God. It is as when we 
see for the first time the towering obelisk of the 
jjreat Matterhorn. At one moment we think of 
the sheer and splendid height to which the old 
earth is thus lifted ; at another, we see the dis- 
tinction in form and shape of the everlasting 



114 REVELATION AND THE IDEAL 

rock ; at still another, we note the disdain, the 
defiance, the terrible strength ; in yet another 
mood, we mark the loneliness of the solemn shaft 
as it rises into the unconcerned and receding sky ; 
and again, we catch sight of the supreme marvel, 
the power of the mountain over the vast world 
above it. It brings down upon itself mist, cloud, 
storm ; it renews its torn robe of white out of 
the sublimities of heaven ; it fixes upon its sum- 
mit the intensest light and heat of the great sun. 
By night and by day, in calm and in storm, it is 
in command of the infinite world above it. This 
is its greatest distinction ; and it is this feature 
that reminds us of man's supreme characteristic, 
his power over the eternal, his prevailing might 
with God. 

How exquisite is the familiar story in which 
the words of the text stand. Jacob was on his 
way to meet the brother whom he had wronged. 
He disposed of his family for their safety as best 
he could. He had found richness and sweetness 
in life since he fled from his outraged brother ; 
and this wealth of love and happiness was under 
the menace of death ; he was sinful, defenseless, 
undone. " And Jacob was left alone ; and there 
wrestled a man with him until the breaking of 
the day. And when he saw that he prevailed not 
against him, he touched the hollow of his thigh ; 
and the hollow of Jacob's thigh was strained as 



TEE MILITANT IDEALIST 115 

he wrestled with him. And he said, Let me go, 
for the day breaketh. And he said, I will not let 
thee go except thou bless me. And he said unto 
him. What is thy name ? And he said, Jacob. 
And he said. Thy name shall be called no more 
Jacob, but Israel : for thou hast striven with 
God and with men and hast prevailed." Let us 
advance by easy steps into the heart of the great 
intimation of God here enshrined. 

1. Here we have one of the earliest intimations 
of the essential humanness of God. He was a 
man with whom Jacob wrestled, a man whose 
nature was mysterious, transcendent. He could 
not gain from the great wrestler his name. There 
was something about him hidden and incompre- 
hensible. There was in his nature a divine secret. 
There was between the two wrestlers an infinite 
contrast, yet question and answer played freely 
between them ; each understood the other ; each 
was essentially akin to the other ; each had a firm 
and determined hold upon the other. The con- 
trast between them was in range of being ; the 
identity between them was in the nature of their 
being. Both were thinkers, both were lovers, both 
were doers, servants of ideal ends ; and as they 
faced each other, soul answered to soul, the finite 
to the Infinite. 

This is the first step into the meaning of the 
story. We trace here the working of the faith 



116 REVELATION AND THE IDEAL 

that man is made in the image of God, that he 
is made a little lower than God. This faith is 
here as it were inverted. God appears in the 
image of man. God is essentially human, carry- 
ing this humanness in an infinite range of being. 
The instinct of all high faith is here at work, 
Man must construe the Infinite Mystery in some 
way and hy some principle. ShaU it be through 
nature, with the worshipers of the sun ? Shall it 
be through the ranges of animal life, like the 
Assyrian and Egyptian ? ShaU we depart from 
our own nature in seeking access to the nature 
of the Eternal? ShaU we seek for the last and 
best character of the universe in its lower crea- 
tions or in its higher ? Shall we return to man 
the thinker, the lover, the doer, the servant of 
ideal ends, the citizen in time of an ideal world, 
and through his nature seek the nature of God? 

How shall we best think of the Infinite Mystery 
that holds us in its strong embrace ? Here is the 
solid earth on which we stand ; here is the encas- 
ing air that we breathe ; here are the winds that 
smite us from the unsunned spaces ; here is the 
fierce light of day, the splendor of the steUar 
universe by night, the majesty of darkness ; here 
is this infinite whole, benign and terrible, holding 
us in its iron and dumb grasp. 

How shall we think of it ? Resolve the cosmic 
pageant into mind, smite it with the wand of the 



THE MILITANT IDEALIST 117 

thinker, and behold how it melts into will, into 
intelligent will, into good will, into the will of 
the Highest. Pierce through color, sound, form 
to the heart of the encompassing mystery, and 
look with awestruck heart upon the Eternal. 
The benignity of the universe is his smile; the 
relentless severity is his austere kindness; the 
sun that warms you, the planet that feeds you, 
and the blessed air that you breathe are but the 
tokens of his presence ; the laws of life, the bitter 
and the sweet, love and joy, love and death, are 
but his encompassing arms. Look the great mys- 
tery in the face. You are alone with it ; it and 
you are the universe, and how shall you think of 
it ? A man, an Infinite Soul, the Eternal Lover is 
with you in the wild soHtude, and his everlasting 
arms are girding you. We think God in the image 
of man, because he has made man in the image of 
God. " I believe it ! 'T is thou, God, that givest, 
't is I who receive. In the first is the last, in thy 
will is my power to believe. All 's one gift : thou 
canst grant it, moreover, as prompt to my prayer 
as I breathe out this breath, as I open these arms 
to the air. From thy wiU stream the worlds, life 
and nature, thy dread sabaoth. 'Tis the weak- 
ness in strength that I cry for ! my flesh that I 
seek in the Godhead ! I seek and find it. O Saul, 
it shall be a face like my face that receives thee ; 
a man like to me thou shalt love, and be loved 



118 REVELATION AND THE IDEAL 

by, forever : a hand like this hand shall throw 
open the gates of new life to thee ! See the 
Christ stand." 

2. Long before Browning wrote his " Saul," 
the words of the text introduced to the world the 
conception of God perfected in Jesus Christ. 
The heart of this Hebrew story is the power of 
the weak nature over the strong. This is the 
amazing intimation, that a sinful man in his dis- 
tress gains a victory over the sinless One in his 
might and joy. This mere intimation is taken up 
into the life of Jesus and becomes its chief dis- 
tinction. The sublimest thing in the soul of Jesus 
is his surrender, immediate, habitual, inevitable, 
to the appeal of distress. Need of every kind 
moved Him. When He saw the mind of his peo- 
ple, empty of true and controlling ideas. He was 
moved with compassion. They appeared to Him 
as sheep without a shepherd, untended, unde- 
fended, living in a panic of fear. When the mul- 
titudes waited upon his ministry, He could not 
send them away to their distant homes unfed. 
When after a long and toilsome day men brought 
their sick to Him, He broke through the loving 
protest of his disciples that He should think of 
Himself, and while the sun was setting laid his 
healing hand upon pain. The weak, the resource- 
less, the distressed life of his people everywhere 
had power over Him. In the borders of Tyre and 



THE MILITANT IDEALIST 119 

Sidon He entered into a house and would have 
no man know it ; but He could not be hid. A 
woman, whose little daughter had an unclean 
spirit, having heard of Him, came and fell down 
at his feet. She was a Syrophcenician by race. 
She besought Him that He would cast the de- 
mon out of her daughter. And He, overwhelmed 
by the appeals of his own race, resting that He 
may return to the tremendous task among men, 
said to her, " Let the children first be fed ; for it 
is not meet to take the children's bread and cast 
it to the dogs." But the mother answered, "Yea, 
Lord ; even the dogs under the table eat of the 
children's crumbs." And He said unto her, " For 
this saying go thy way ; the demon is gone out of 
thy daughter." This poor mother appealed to the 
moral majesty of Jesus, and He could not with- 
hold the answer to her prayer. Her need, her 
woe commanded his fullness and joy. 

When Paul came to reflect upon the career of 
Jesus, his thought broke into these great words : 
"Ye know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ. 
Though he was rich, yet for our sakes he be- 
came poor, that we, through his poverty might 
become rich." And again, dwelling upon Jesus 
and his continuous surrender to human need, and 
trying to account for this divine grace, Paul 
breaks into a philosophic poem. The Christ in 
Jesus was eternal in God, an equal there. But 



120 BEVELATION AND THE IDEAL 

there the Christ would not stay; He emptied 
Himself, He would become man, He would be- 
come obedient unto death, yea, the death of the 
cross. He heard the prayer of the world groan- 
ing and travailing in pain until now. He could 
not hear that prayer and leave it unanswered. 
He came to men, He became partner in their woe, 
and He placed his divine strength at the service 
of their utmost need. That is Paul's philosophic 
lyric. And he does not end it here. He shows 
God's estimate of this sublime surrender of Jesus 
to the weakness of the world : " Wherefore, also, 
God highly exalted him, and gave unto him the 
name which is above every name; that in the 
name of Jesus every knee should bow, of things 
in heaven, and things on earth, and things under 
the earth, and that every tongue should confess 
that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the 
Father." There is the climax of the wonderful 
lyric. The surrender of power to the service of 
weakness is the worth before which earth and 
heaven and hell bow in honor ; the surrender of 
power to the appeal of human woe is the sovereign 
distinction of Jesus ; and this surrender of Jesus 
was possible because the almighty love of the 
Father was in him, because the sublime distinc- 
tion of Jesus in time is the eternal distinction 
of God. For this is the momentous importance of 
Jesus for men ; they may read through his char- 



THE MILITANT IDEALIST 121 

acter the cliaracter of the Infinite ; they may con- 
clude that as Jesus was during those few immor- 
tal years in Palestine, so God was and is and 
forever will be — the Eternal over whom essen- 
tial human need must prevail. 

3. We have come where we can now see why 
it is that essential human need has power over 
God. It is the eternal nobility of God that puts 
Him in the power of weak men. We come to Him 
through man at his best ; we come to Him through 
Jesus; we adore Him because his nature is eter- 
nal compassion, because He cannot listen to the 
prayer of weakness and woe unmoved ; because 
in the long courses of history and on the fiery 
paths of personal discipline He is bringing, in his 
own mysterious way, into the world's heart his 
moral power, his moral security, his ineffable love. 

We touch here the border of the black tragedy 
of man's mistake about God. Look into the sac- 
rificial systems of the world in Ammon, in Moab, 
in Mexico, in Peru, in India, in Greece, and in 
Israel. Look at the mother throwing her child 
into the Ganges ; witness the slaughter of human 
victims on Mexican and Peruvian altars ; watch 
as men and women send their children through 
the fire to Moloch ; consider the beauty of Greece 
sacrificed in her temples ; and consider again the 
story of Jephtha and his daughter, the first He- 
brew and his son. Look this practice of human sac- 



122 REVELATION AND THE IDEAL 

rifice in the face and see what it means ; consider 
the sacrifice of animal life to God instead of human 
beings, and ask for its motive. Whether human 
or animal or floral, this system of sacrifice, among 
any people and among all peoples, is the most 
tragic thing in the religious history of the world. 
That system is founded upon this truth, that God 
may be moved by man ; it is also founded upon 
the appalling mistake that God is movable, not 
because He is infinitely noble, but because He is 
dark and cruel and bloodthirsty. Placate God 
with blood ; move Him by a rich display of hor- 
rors ; pamper Him with the magnificence of your 
bribes, and you may win Him to your side. O 
friends, here is the superlative blasphemy against 
the Most High. Here is the historic embodiment 
of the tragic mistake concerning God. Here is 
the woeful result to which we come when we read 
the heart of the Eternal through the brutal human 
conqueror, or through the irresponsible king, or 
through the unregenerate man anywhere. Brutal 
man has made God in his own image ; upon that 
conception of God the sacrificial systems of the 
world, one and all, are built. 

From the fatal mistake into which the priest 
has led the worshiper in all nations, we are deliv- 
ered by the prophet. We cannot tell what we 
here owe to the prophets of Israel — Amos, Hosea, 
Habakkuk, Isaiah, Jeremiah, and the nameless 



THE MILITANT IDEALIST 123 

prophet of the Exile ; they read the character of 
God through the idea of infinite honor, and they 
called the experience of men and families and na- 
tions at its best as the solemn witness that their 
vision of God was true. In the Book of Exodus 
this prophetic conception of God becomes the 
foundation of Israel's hope. The children of Is- 
rael are in sore bondage. The tale of bricks is 
doubled. The lash of the taskmaster is more and 
more terrible; the life of the bondman is more and 
more intolerable. Still, there is no eye to pity 
anywhere ; there is no hand to bring salvation. 
The people in their sorrow can only groan and ap- 
peal to the dumb heavens. But the heavens are 
not dumb. The Eternal Justice sees and hears ; 
He it is who appears in the burning bush to the 
Midian shepherd ; He it is who overcomes the 
selfishness of that shepherd, commissions him to 
be the deliverer of those bondmen, sends him to 
his task, sustains him at it, and enables him to be- 
come the redeemer of his brethren. That is the 
conception of God upon which Israel was founded ; 
from which Israel's great faith and great litera- 
ture came. God in the majesty of his compassion 
is in the power of men, when in their weakness 
and suffering they appeal to Him. That is the 
great idea of God which Jesus takes up into his 
life and which comes from his heart as " Our 
Father, who art in heaven." God is in the power 



124 REVELATION AND THE IDEAL 

of men, not because He is tlie subject of any kind 
or manner of unworthy appeal, but because of his 
intrinsic and eternal nobility. He wiU not be 
unmoved when the weak are driven to the wall, 
when the strong become oppressors, when the 
righteous are forsaken. That is the world's high- 
est faith ; and of the truth of that faith the career 
of Jesus is the supreme witness. 

4. Here we note in our human world the 
shadow of God. That is the cry of your child in 
pain ; you rush to its relief. The weakness of 
your child is before you in your waking hours 
and in your dreams. That weakness commands 
your devotion as a mother, that weakness com- 
mands your strength as a father. The world is 
ruled from its cradles. Round the nurseries of 
the world are grouped its farms, factories, mines, 
its vast systems of exchange, its myriad forms of 
productive toil. From the weakness of childhood 
comes the chief appeal that sets in motion and 
that keeps in motion the stupendous industry of 
civilized man. The perpetual surrender of the 
strong mother to her weak child, the perpetual 
heroism of the devoted father in answer to the 
call of the helpless life in his home, is the shadow 
of the Eternal Father in the true parenthood of 
the race. 

When lovers meet, when they solemnly cove- 
nant each with the other, when they accept the 



THE MILITANT IDEALIST 125 

sacrament of mamage and take each other "for 
better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness 
and in health," to love and to cherish till death 
do them part, they seldom think of more than 
one side of their privilege. They think of the 
new fountain of love in their hearts, the joyous 
possession which each holds in the love of the 
other, the inspiring days that have forever ban- 
ished the old hours of dullness and deadness, 
the world as it rolls transfigured in the light that 
now enfolds it. It is impossible for them not to 
rejoice in this way; and their joy adds to the 
noble happiness of all who see them. But there 
is another and a diviner side to human love. The 
supreme privilege of all love worthy of the name 
is in hearing the prayer of deep need, in imme- 
diate responsiveness to the call for service, in 
eager and glad surrender to the appeal of weak- 
ness. To be strong for each other's weaknesses, 
to be immediate in answer to the call for help, 
to be inevitably moved by the opportunity sup- 
plied by a soul in distress, — that is the divine 
privilege of marriage. The best issue of the 
noblest home is not the memory of a husband or 
a wife who never left a wish ungratified, — that 
is the egotistic memory of a fool ; — but the con- 
sciousness of having won l^rough the companion- 
ship and anxious discipline of family life a constant 
alertness to the need of others, an immediate re- 



126 REVELATION AND THE IDEAL 

sponsiveness in the presence of distress, a habitual 
inevitable surrender of power to lift up and en- 
noble the weaker soul. 

When we see a rich and powerful friend stand- 
ing by a weaker friend in distress, like Moabitish 
Ruth cleaving to Naomi; when we witness a 
mighty patriot like Abraham Lincoln consecrat- 
ing to the service of his afflicted nation the wealth 
of his manhood; when we consider the shining 
army of teachers in our schools in all the ham- 
lets and cities of our country, turning eyes of 
wonder and lives of devotion upon our children ; 
when we look upon our missionaries in the black 
regions of our own land and in other lands serv- 
ing in the strength of a rich and tender love ; 
when we note anywhere the resourceful lover of 
men in the work of rescue, moved by the appeal 
of sin, and standing by to give help, like a great 
ship standing by some ill-fated and foundering 
vessel, there we note the image of the Eternal 
Lover, there we behold the shadow of God. 

This discontent of love with its own security 
and strength is the best thing in the highest hu- 
man life. The old blasphemy, that part of the 
bliss of heaven would consist in looking down 
upon the torments of hell and enjoying the con- 
trast, is absolutely impossible to man at his high- 
est. When Dr. Griffin says that Christ shall be 
to his own dear people a covert from " the hail 



THE MILITANT IDEALIST 127 

that shall eternally lash the howling millions of 
the damned," he sets the Christian soul within 
a security that becomes a prison, that becomes 
an inferno. Love may be defeated ; that is con- 
ceivable. That it should rest from its labors, sit 
serenely in the seats of the just, congratulate 
itself on its own security in God and its immunity 
from further sacrifice, while other human beings 
live a life loveless and full of woe, is absolutely 
inconceivable. We have come a great way from 
many of the views of the fathers ; we have come 
this distance under the guidance of God's Holy 
Spirit; we have come to see that the Christian 
lover of men must be the ceaseless servant of 
men; that Christianity means love, that love 
means power, that noble power by its very nature 
stands in perpetual surrender to the appeal of 
sin and shame. When this mood deepens and 
widens in any community, there we find the true 
apocalypse of God. This is his nature. He is 
forever bowing the heavens to enter anew the 
life of man in his distress. Our God, the God 
and Father of Jesus Christ, is in eternal surren- 
der to the sorrow and hope of our human world. 
5. Here, too, in our story we find the defen- 
sive principle in this highest conception of God. 
Man's need has power over the infinitely rich 
and tender God. Man's prayer finds this affluent 
and mighty Presence in gracious surrender. But 



128 REVELATION AND THE IDEAL 

the prayer must be not only through thought and 
feeling ; it must be also and always through ac- 
tion. It must be a prayer expressed finally in 
the struggle of the will in the strenuous endeavor 
of life. This prevailing prayer must be a moral 
wrestle with God. God has ordained that the 
supreme good of man, a just and kind soul, shall 
be an achievement. A muscular body is never an 
endowment, it is always an achievement. The 
capacity is bestowed, the actual athletic condition 
is attained. Knowledge can never be a gift ; it 
must always be an acquisition ; a trained intellect 
cannot be imparted ; it must be won. By the 
same law character is governed. We bring from 
God the capacity for it ; we live in a world where 
the highest offers itself to us, where the lowest 
makes its seductive appeal. We must choose be- 
tween good essential and good apparent; we 
must first see good essential as an ideal and then 
we must struggle to give it complete dominion 
over life. 

The supreme good, a just and kind soul, for 
most men is only a bare and blazing ideal. It is 
a bare, unattained ideal because men wait for it 
to impart itself, to remake them out of its distant 
heaven, to relieve them of all struggle, and to 
take them into its own perfect worth and peace. 
The ideal will do no such thing. It will guide, 
but we must follow ; it will show the way, but 



THE MILITANT IDEALIST 129 

we must walk in that way. It is the divine image 
sent to awaken the intellect, win the heart, and 
move the will to action. It is the divine image, 
but it can become the divine fact only by stead- 
fast and unconquerable endeavor. While we wait, 
it hangs high in the air ; while we delay, it comes 
no nearer to our weakness and discontent ; while 
we fail to work out our own salvation, it remains 
afar. To-day it is afar because we have made 
vision and feeling do the work of wiU, because 
we have expected to receive when it was our duty 
to achieve, because we have thought that God 
would impart salvation when we should have be- 
lieved that He would enable us to attain it. As 
well believe that by a dream we may circum- 
navigate the globe as that by a vision or a senti- 
ment we may compass the supreme good. Not to 
dreams does the soil yield her fruits or the earth 
her riches, but to the wise wiU in the strong 
hand ; not to dreams do the wonders of science 
come or the beautiful worlds of art, but to the 
illuminated will working by intellect and patient 
toil ; not by the path of dreams does ideal justice 
and kindness enter the personal soul, but by the 
path of strong crying and tears ; not to the 
dreamer of God's word, but to the doer thereof 
does the wilderness of human society blossom as 
the rose. Inaction is poverty, ignorance, moral 
woe, hopeless despair. 



130 BEVELATION AND THE IDEAL 

"We must figure the universe always as the 
Divine Presence. We must resolve all but per- 
sonal souls like ourselves into the Infinite Soul. 
We must think of God as inconceivably rich 
in his bounty and as with us in our night 
and distress, that He may bless us. We must 
think of trial, disappointment, discontent, pain 
— all the things that threaten to baffle and over- 
whelm us — as the girding arms of the Eternal 
Love ; we must accept these as a challenge to the 
great contest with God ; we must hold Him fast 
and wrestle with Him till the day break and the 
shadows flee away ; we must appeal to Him by 
the whole moving might of our need. We must 
utter our prayer through wills in action, through 
the tension and struggle of our entire being ; 
then we shall receive in the solemn fiery dawn of 
some great calm morning the surrender of the 
Eternal Wrestler : Thou hast prevailed with God; 
take thy new name ; live forever in the blessed- 
ness of thy triumphant wrestle with the Infinite 
Love. 



THE IDEALIST IN THE DREAMER 

" And Joseph dreamed a dream, and he told it to his brethren : and 
they hated him yet the more." 

Gen. XXXVII, 5. 

The story of Joseph is one of the richest, one 
of the tenderest, one of the most beautiful in the 
literature of the world. It cannot be retold ; one 
must read it for one's self. It is recorded, as you 
are aware, in the last part of the Book of Gene- 
sis, beginning with the thirty-seventh chapter. 
Familiar with it since boyhood, I have read it 
recently again and again, and I have been im- 
pressed as never before with its inimitable human 
quality, its fidelity to life, its insight into the 
governing passions in the heart of man, its rec- 
ognition of the evil and the good in existence, 
and its issue in a noble reconciliation and peace. 
Here is the confused drama of human life, with 
its conflict of ends and interests ; its pride, jeal- 
ousy, cruelty, and restraining fear ; its reverses 
whereby power passes from the tyrant to the vic- 
tim ; its discipline of pain ; its magnanimity, for- 
giveness, and victorious love. May such be the 
issue of all the discord of our poor world, such 
its final triumph over evil. 



132 BEVELATION AND THE IDEAL 

The Greeks made a sharp distinction between 

the vision and the dream, between seeing when 

one is awake and seeing when one is asleep. The 

dream they called the vision of a shadow, the 

beholding of something insubstantial and vain ; 

such an experience is a delusion : the real vision, 

the experience when one is awake is beholding 

something true, something that is part of the 

substantial world. We have inherited from the 

Greeks this contrast : we set in contrast the vi- 

f 

sion by day and the dream by night ; we say the 
experience when one is awake is real, the expe- 
rience in sleep is unreal. We contrast them as 
the substantial and the insubstantial and vain. 

It is not to be supposed that the Hebrews 
thought that a man could drive as good a bar- 
gain when he was asleep as when he was awake ; 
that is not at present a characteristic of the race, 
and probably it never has been. If any Hebrew 
wanted to do business, he would want to do it 
when he was awake ; if he employed an agent to 
do business for him, he would not wish that agent 
to act in a dream. On the lower levels of life the 
same contrast reigned in Hebrew thought, as in 
Greek, and as in our modern way of thinking : 
on the higher levels of life this people held that 
the dream was a form of revelation, an intima- 
tion of spiritual truth, often of very great signi- 
ficance. There is that sublime passage in Job : — 



THE IDEALIST IN THE DREAMER 133 

In thoughts from the visions of the night, when 
deep sleep falleth upon men, 

Fear came upon me, and trembling, which made 
all my bones to shake. 

Then a spirit passed before my face ; the hair of 
my flesh stood up : 

. . . There was silence, and I heard a voice, saying, 
"Shall mortal man be more just than God! Shall 
a man be more pure than his Maker ? " 

Thus through a dream the eternal justice and 
purity were delivered to the world. When Jo- 
seph and Mary and the infant Jesus were in Beth- 
lehem, being warned of God in a dream, Joseph 
took his family into Egypt ; being warned of God 
in a dream, he left Egypt for Palestine ; and 
again being warned of God in a dream, he turned 
toward Nazareth, where Jesus grew to manhood. 
The place of the dream in the economy of reve- 
lation is an extraordinary one. This aspect of the 
thought of the people of Israel is deserving of 
the most careful and sympathetic treatment. For 
them the dream was one great organ for the de- 
liverance of divine wisdom. 

Here we have this Hebrew dreamer, Joseph. 
Let me recall to you his two chief dreams. First, 
he is in the field reaping, a farmer boy with his 
brethren. He and they are binding sheaves and 
his sheaf stood upright, and the sheaves of his 
brethren came and did obeisance to his sheaf. 
The dream was rightly understood by his breth- 



134 REVELATION AND THE IDEAL 

ren ; it was the dream of future preeminence. His 
second dream was still more extravagant. He 
dreamed that the sun and the moon and the 
eleven stars did obeisance unto him. Again his 
brethren and his father perfectly understood the 
dream, and were not pleased with it. It was a 
dream of future preeminence. Let these dreams 
introduce our subject which I am to discuss un- 
der this old type. I wish to speak of the dream 
in three forms ; first, the dream pure and simple; 
second, the dream as play, as make-believe, chiefly 
in the life of children ; and third, and mainly, 
the dream as reverie, in which we have a pro- 
phecy of the future. 

First, then, the dream pure and simple. Its 
chief value for our purpose is as a revelation of 
the moral character of the dreamer. We are told 
to-day that a dream is mainly a revelation of a 
state of indigestion, and that is often true. A 
man's dreams without doubt often tell of' a dis- 
turbed body ; the greater part of them, perhaps,* 
have no other significance than that ; they are a 
commentary on the state of the dreamer's body, 
his nervous system, the condition of his brain, as 
affected by the condition of his digestive organs. 
One dream in twenty will have a different signif- 
icance ; it will reflect to him his own character 
when the will is quiescent, when he cannot hide 
things from himself ; for we are all the while 



THE IDEALIST IN THE DREAMER 135 

trying to disguise our real selves from ourselves, 
and the greatest imposture tliat we practice in life 
is imposture upon ourselves. We almost persuade 
ourselves that we are saints and heroes. Did you 
ever dream that you were going into battle ? Did 
you discover that you were a brave man then ? I 
never did. You never did. And when you awoke, 
did you not feel a blush upon your face as red as 
sunrise, to think you were such a coward ? When a 
rowboat is offshore, and a man who should hold 
the tiller falls asleep, the boat swings landward 
or seaward according to the tide ; it has no life 
of its own. In sleep the will is quiescent, the helms- 
man of the mind, that holds the mind true against 
its desires and against the deep current of char- 
acter often, that steers it on to a goal other than 
that which it wants ; when this helmsman of the 
soul is asleep, then you discover the real man, 
the wide and wild tides that toss him hither and 
thither. 

Did you ever hear a child pray in its sleep? 
Nothing could be more impressive than the few 
broken words of prayer that one will sometimes 
hear coming from the heart of a sleeping child, 
revealing the utter sincerity and trust within. 
Did you ever stand by the bedside of a noble 
friend in delirium, and hear him talk out the 
deepest things in his life, lay bare his whole be- 
ing to your gaze ? Did you ever feel so near to 



136 REVELATION AND THE IDEAL 

God as when you listened to his prayer — " Our 
Father, who art in heaven " — " though he slay 
me, yet will I trust in him " ? Broken words put 
together without connection, and yet all telling 
of the reality and the sanctity of your friend's 
heart. For many months before Dr. Bushnell 
died, he was part of the time in delirium, and 
his family have recorded the awe with which they 
heard his words, and looked upon the springs of 
his inmost soul. It seemed to them that they 
were looking upon the emotions, the impulses, 
the movement of the spirit of God ; so great may 
be the majesty of a dream as a revelation of the 
moral character of the dreamer. 

The classical example of the dream as a revel- 
ation of bad character is Lady Macbeth in the 
scene where she is trying to wash the spots from 
her hand. She can conceal by day her part in 
the murder of Duncan ; she cannot hide it when 
she is asleep. There she appears, the most im- 
pressive person in the whole tragedy, washing 
her hands, finding the spots that she cannot rub 
clean, " Out, out, damned spot " ; there she is 
telling everybody in her dream what she has done, 
revealing her inmost soul. Our Lord said there 
is nothing hidden that shall not be revealed, and 
a glance down into the depths of the human soul 
at the law which operates the soul, which turns 
everything inside outside, makes us cry with the 



THE IDEALIST IN THE DREAMER 137 

psalmist, "We are fearfully and wonderfully 
made." The dream may well serve to us as a 
revelation of the way that the tide is setting ; the 
helmsman is asleep ; is the boat going landward 
or seaward? 

We pass now to the second part of our sub- 
ject, the dream as play, as make-believe. What 
is its significance here ? One of the deepest, and 
one into \^ich the educators of our day are look- 
ing with a sense of the charm and the profound 
meaning of child-life at play. There has been a 
wide induction made in our time of the rich and 
varied forms of play; much thought has been 
given to them by philosophic educators, with the 
result that a vast amount of new knowledge has 
been gained in the psychology of children. 

The difference between the play of a boy and 
the play of a girl is a revelation of the generic 
difference of their nature. The boy, with his 
battleships, his soldiers, his generals, gathering 
round him the symbols of the manhood of the 
world, is revealing his nature as a little man. 
The girl, with her dolls, with her refined human 
interests, gathering round her the symbols of the 
womanhood of the world, is revealing thereby the 
fact that she is a little woman. There is thus an 
apocalypse through play of the utmost moment. 

Upon this vast section of our subject I can 
only touch. Play is, indeed, beautiful ! The play 



138 REVELATION AND THE IDEAL 

of a child is close to the beginning, the deep be- 
ginning of our human life. It is greatly signifi- 
cant of the nature of the soul that has just ar- 
rived from God. It is a revelation of the part 
that this soul has been predestined to take in the 
history of the world. I hope that other examples 
will occur to you of the beauty and the wonder 
of that make-believe world of childhood, and the 
depth of meaning that it reveals. I should be 
sorry for myself and for you if we should miss 
that out of which came one of the finest poems 
in the English language ; Wordsworth's " Ode 
on Immortality." We join the poet when he gives 
thanks, — 

"... for those first affections, 
Those shadowy recollections, 
Which, be they what they may, 
Are yet the fountain light of all our day. 
Are yet a master light of all our seeing ; 

Uphold us, cherish, and have power to make 
Our noisy years seem moments in the being 
Of the eternal Silence : truths that wake. 

To perish never ; 
Which neither listlessness, nor mad endeavor, 

Nor Man nor Boy, 
Nor all that is at enmity with joy. 
Can utterly abolish or destroy. 

Hence in a season of calm weather 
Though inland far we be. 
Our souls have sight of that immortal sea 
Which brought us hither ; 
Can in a moment travel thither, 
And see the children sport upon the shore. 
And hear the mighty waters rolling evermore." 



THE IDEALIST IN THE DREAMER 139 

We come now to the last part of our subject, 
the dream as reverie, as a forecast of the future. 
Note here the strength of desire. Every desire, 
when it is strong, tries to get possession of the 
imagination and fling up its banner there ; it 
tries to keep that banner in the imagination till 
satisfaction has been found. The hungry man 
pictures food ; the thirsty man flings up into the 
imagination an image of drink ; the poor man 
paints there a picture of wealth ; the friendless 
man, some sweet, hallowing, comforting society ; 
the ambitious man, power. Every desire, when 
it is strong, paints itself in the imagination, 
holds the picture there, and seeks gratification 
by the whole power of the mind. When the de- 
sire is strong and base, when it gets control of 
the mind, the mind is thereby dishonored ; there 
we have the beginning of a career of shame. When 
the desire is strong and noble, when it gains con- 
trol of the mind, the mind is thereby exalted 
and there is the beginning of a life of honor. 
The reverie has thus a twofold significance ; it is 
creative of character, good or bad, and it is a 
forecast of the future. 

Note here the dream of preeminence as a fore- 
cast of the future. Recall the dreams of Joseph, 
of the sheaves, and the sun and the moon and 
the stars ; both are pictures of preeminence in 
the future. Is it legitimate for a boy or a youth 



140 REVELATION AND THE IDEAL 

to indulge in a day-dream, in which he paints his 
future preeminence over acquaintances, over the 
members of his family, over the men of his time ? 
Under certain circumstances it surely is legiti- 
mate. This Hebrew dreamer made his dream 
just by his willingness to work for it and to suffer 
for it. 

Recall his history. After his dream he was 
thrown into a pit ; from that pit he was taken 
and sold as a slave to the Midianites ; by them 
he was sold as a slave to the chief guard of Pha- 
raoh, in Egypt. Did he abandon his dream ? Not 
he; he lived for it, he worked for it, he suffered 
for it, he put justice into it, and when he was 
serving and advancing in Potiphar's house, there 
came the diabolical charge, of which he was in- 
nocent, which sent him to the dungeon. Did he 
despair then ? Not he ; he suffered yet more for 
his dream, he toiled for it, he lived for it, and 
rose again. When he interpreted the dream of 
the chief butler and saw him go back to power 
in Pharaoh's house, Joseph begged him when it 
was well with him to remember his friend and 
interpreter still in prison and there unjustly; and 
when the chief butler forgot him altogether the 
Hebrew dreamer did not despair. He held to his 
dream, he toiled for it, he suffered for it on to 
the end. When he was brought into Pharaoh's 
house, and interpreted the dream to the king, of 



THE IDEALIST IN THE DREAMER 141 

the seven fat kine, and the seven lean kine, the 
seven full ears, and the seven lean ears, as the 
seven years of plenty and the seven years of 
famine that were to be upon the land, what hap- 
pened then? He was made the chief man in 
Egypt, and still toiled and lived that his dream 
might come true. This man put justice and kind- 
ness into his dream of future preeminence and 
made the dream great. 

Read again Browning's great poem, " A Gram- 
marian's Funeral " ; see the scholar's dream of 
preeminence and then note the mighty effort 
which he was ready to make, the nameless suf- 
fering which he was willing to endure in order 
to make his dream come true, and then tell me 
if you do not think his preeminence, when it ar- 
rived, was deserved. Look at the dreams of the 
real dreamers, the poets, musicians, master work- 
men everywhere; mark the years of preparation, 
the years of apprenticeship, the years of suf- 
fering before their dream begins to come true. 
Consider the physician, who is dreaming of 
becoming a great member of his profession; 
there are ten years of study before he can be- 
gin ; there are ten years more before he can 
rank among the highest. The dream of pre- 
eminence, when you toil for it and suffer for 
it, is just. 

This man put humanity into his dream of 



142 REVELATION AND THE IDEAL 

preeminence by becoming in his preeminence the 
servant of all who needed his service. This is a 
beautiful part of Joseph's story. He toiled dur- 
ing those seven years of plenty, stored Egypt 
with corn that the populations on the Nile might 
survive and that the adjacent countries, suffering 
from the famine when it should come, might live 
and not die. When a man determines, as Abra- 
ham Lincoln did, "If I ever get into power, I 
will hit that institution of slavery hard," he com- 
bines in one a dream of personal exaltation and 
social service. 

There is nothing that wise men like to see 
better than boys in their homes, young men in 
the secondary schools, and in college dreaming 
of the future, dreaming that they are to be ora^ 
tors, preachers, educators, physicians, poets, musi- 
cians, journalists, any one of a hundred other 
things, and sure that they are to be princes in 
their calling. Nothing is more wholesome than 
this dream if these dreamers are willing to work 
for it, if they mean by it power to serve the 
world. Such dreams will bring God into their 
lives ; such dreams will keep them pure and 
noble till they attain. We may well thank God 
for the dreams of youth, for the young men that 
see visions ; they may swell with egoism now and 
then, but if they put good service and high self- 
sacrifice into their dreams, God is there. Burns 



THE IDEALIST IN THE DREAMER 143 

sings for the million in the lines in which he re- 
veals his young soul, — 

" E' en then, a wish (I mind its pow'r), 
A wish that to my latest hour 

Shall strongly heave my breast, 
That I for poor auld Scotland's sake 
Some usefu' plan or book could make, 

Or sing a sang at least." 

He toiled, he suffered, that he might sing; 
finally he did sing more than one song, a group 
of songs that are like the music of the spheres. 
His dream, his forecast of his own future in the 
light of what he did, and the way in which he 
did it, is noble and beautiful. 

Sometimes the dream of an individual is the 
dream for his race ; it cannot be wholly fulfilled 
in him ; it takes all time in which to realize that 
dream. Such a dream the father of Joseph had, 
when he went out a wanderer, and was overtaken 
by night in a solitary place, and lay down there 
to sleep with a stone for his pillow. The dream 
was of a ladder running from earth to heaven 
and complete exchange of being between man's 
life and God's. That dream is one great fore- 
cast and prophecy of the religious life of man- 
kind. A greater member of that race, the great- 
est, the divinest, representing mankind at its best, 
stood in Nazareth and said that He was that lad- 
der, the realization of that ancient dream. Since 



144 REVELATION AND THE IDEAL 

then men have gone on repeating this dream, 
toiling, suffering, praying, living and dying, that 
the world of God and the world of man might 
blend in one eternal song. 

" We are the music-makers 
And we are the dreamers of dreams, 

Wandering by lone sea-breakers, 

And sitting by desolate streams; 
World-losers and world-forsakers, 

On whom the pale moon gleams; 
Yet we are the movers and shakers 

Of the world forever, it seems. 

" With wonderful deathless ditties 
We build up the world's great cities. 

And out of a fabulous story 

We fashion an empire's glory: 
One man with a dream, at pleasure. 

Shall go forth and conquer a crown; 
And three with a new song's measure 

Can trample a kingdom down. 

" We, in the ages lying 

In the buried past of the earth. 
Built Nineveh with our sighing, 

And Babel itself in our mirth; 
And o'erthrew them with prophesying 

To the old of the new world's worth j 
For each age is a dream that is dying, 

Or one that is coming to birth." 



XI 
THE DELIVERER AND HIS IDEAL 

" Gk>d called to him out of the midst of the bush." 

Ex. in, 4. 

There is usually a key to the life of the great 
man, some experience that lets one into the se- 
cret of his career, some principle from which that 
career flows like the stream from its source. If 
one would understand the career of Martin Lu- 
ther, one must hear him singing on the Santa 
Scala, " The just shall live by faith." In the way 
of promise the whole career of Martin Luther is 
there. If one would understand the career of the 
great Stoic, Epictetus, one must hear him ask, 
"Who made thee a slave, Caesar or thyself?" 
There is the prophetic beginning of that glorious 
struggle in physical bondage for spiritual free- 
dom. 

By British and American scholars fifty years 
ago the German philosopher, Immanuel Kant, 
was regarded as an enigma, as nearly an incom- 
prehensible mystery. Kant is still difficult, wind- 
ing, and intricate, hard to comprehend ; but there 
are' two keys to him that make his career funda- 
mentally clear and immensely interesting, — one 
intellectual, the other moral. He had been read- 



146 REVELATION AND THE IDEAL 

ing the writings of the Scottish philosopher, 
David Hume, who said that the senses are the 
sources of all our knowledge. Here Kant asks 
his first great question, how this sensuous expe- 
rience comes to be the ordered mind of a rational 
being. That question is the key to Kant on the 
intellectual side. On the moral side this philoso- 
pher said there were two things that impressed 
him with ever-increasing wonder and awe, the 
starry heavens above and the moral law within ; 
the one taught him his insignificance as an atom 
in an infinite material universe, the other taught 
him his transcendence as a morally accountable 
being. Here is the key to Kant, the moralist and 
the man. 

The story of the burning bush contains the 
key to the career of Moses. That career is long, 
difficult, obscure, uncertain at many points ; 
scholars disagree about it ; perhaps it will always 
remain impossible to get at the truth of it as a 
whole ; it was lived so long ago and the record of 
it is somewhat confused. Yet the great experi- 
ence embodied in the vision of the bush that 
burned and was not consumed lets one into the 
secret of the significance to all after ages of this 
monumental man. Till this vision came to him 
Moses was a local character ; till then he counted 
for little in the history of his people, and for 
nothing in the history of the world. 



THE DELIVERER AND HIS IDEAL 147 

Looking backward from the moment of this 
vision, we recall the chief events of his life. We 
note the tender beauty of his birth. His father 
and mother were slaves and the mother, seeing 
that he was a goodly child, (what mother ever 
thought her child other than goodly ?) hid him 
three months from the hand of the destroyer ; and 
when she could hide him no longer, she made an 
ark for him and set him afloat among the flags 
of the river Nile. There is the romance of the 
discovery of this concealed child among the flags 
of the river by Pharaoh's daughter and the fur- 
ther romance of his adoption into the household 
of Pharaoh. 

Later another and a finer note is struck. When 
Moses grew to manhood he went out to see his 
brethren and to look upon their burdens. Here 
is the beginning of greatness ; went out from the 
palace of the Pharaohs to see his brethren and to 
look upon their woe. He did not fare well in this 
venture ; he got into a quarrel with an Egyptian, 
who died by his hand. Then came the flight into 
the Midian wilderness and his occupation there 
as a shepherd. There we mark the security of his 
life, the comfort of it, the content of it, the chance 
for profound and happy brooding upon the na- 
ture of the Infinite, upon the mysteries of human 
existence, the charging of his imagination with 
all the great thoughts that would naturally arise, 



148 REVELATION AND THE IDEAL 

in such a scene, in the mind of a great man. We 
observe, too, that he has time to discover the best 
in the thoughts of the accessible races of his age. 
We further note a happy domestic life ; he had 
the creative comfort of a good home. This is the 
whole story of the career of Moses, briefly told, 
up to the time when this great experience oc- 
curred. You notice that it is mostly personal, 
that it is extremely local, of little consequence to 
his own people, and of none whatever to the life 
of the world. 

When the great idea came, it took him and 
turned him from a local character into a world 
character. That is what the great idea always does 
when it seizes a man ; it takes him and in ever- 
widening circles makes him significant ; if he is 
a great nature, it makes him significant for the 
entire contemporary world ; if he is great enough, 
it lends him significance for all time. 

The great idea did not get complete control of 
this man's life all at once. It bade him go back 
to Egypt and become the deliverer of his people, 
but he did not altogether like that commission ; 
he questioned the divine voice that was speaking 
to him. " They will ask who sent me ; what shall 
I say? " "I, the divine, personal life of the uni- 
verse, sent you." " They will ask for a sign. They 
are creatures of sense and of time ; these great 
abstractions will not weigh with them." " Take 



THE DELIVERER AND HIS IDEAL 149 

your shepherd's crook, it will become a serpent 
to the oppressor." " But I am not eloquent." 
" Who made the organs of speech ? I will be with 
your utterance, I will give you eloquence, I will 
send with you your brother, who is not always 
sensible, but you will be wisdom to him and good 
sense, and he will be eloquence to you." " O Lord, 
I do not want to go ! " There is the chief diffi- 
culty. Looking into this reluctance to accept the 
commission from the great idea, we discover 
modesty ; the great man is always full of mis- 
giving, he does not know his own size. Till this 
hour this man's life had cast no shadow ; he 
had no means of measuring himself and he felt 
totally unfit to do what the vision commissioned 
him to do. There was something noble in his 
reluctance to serve; there was also something 
ignoble. 

There was in Moses what there is in every man, 
a natural shirk. He wanted to go on dreaming 
and brooding in an irresponsible way out there 
in the Midian wilderness ; he did not want to face 
great tasks. Is not the man typical here of our 
own time? The vision comes to men through 
Jesus to-day, saying, "You are a son of God. 
There is the great idea for you ; it commissions 
you to live in the spirit and serve your generation 
by a great life." The reply is apt to be, " We 
are not good enough for that ; we are unfit for 



150 REVELATION AND THE IDEAL 

any such commission ; it is too sublime ; we are 
creatures of a day and our dwellings are in the 
dust." Again the noble element is here, the sense 
of weakness, of limitation, of incapacity, the con- 
sciousness of serious disqualification for the high 
calling of Christ. But along with this noble mod- 
esty there is ignoble feeling, there is laziness, 
there is cowardice, there is the shirk who wants 
to crawl through the world just as easily and as 
comfortably as he can. Analyze your soul ; do 
honor to all that is good in you ; search out and 
hold before your eyes the base thing that is keep- 
ing you from the acceptance of the great com- 
mission. 

The great idea, when it came to this man and 
was accepted, utilized the whole past experience 
of his life. According to the record, Moses was 
well advanced in years before this vision came to 
him, before the idea took possession of him ; when 
it came, it turned the entire contents of his pre- 
vious life to its own account. He was a scholar, 
he was a thinker, he understood men, he knew 
the Egyptians, he knew the Hebrews, he knew 
their environments ; all this knowledge, all this 
experience, all this capacity, and all this power 
the great idea marshaled and pressed into its own 
service. 

Here again this Hebrew is typical. Cromwell 
was forty-four years old when he became signifi- 



THE DELIVERER AND HIS IDEAL 151 

cant to his nation; but all those forty-four years 
of manly living, wise work, and pious musing 
were pressed into the service of his idea ; he had 
been called to become the deliverer and the de- 
fender of the people of England. Washington 
was forty-three years old when he took command 
of the American army under the old Cambridge 
elm ; but the entire career of Washington fitted 
him to be the servant of the great idea when it 
arrived. Abraham Lincoln was forty-nine years 
of age before he became a national figure, in his 
famous debate with Stephen Douglas ; but when 
once he became the tribune of the people, their 
great representative, all those forty-nine years 
and their contents fell into line and he was the 
leader of a grand army of gift and power. Gen- 
eral Grant was forty-two when he stood forth as 
the lieutenant-general of the Federal forces in 
the great war for the preservation of the Union ; 
but again, he was a graduate of West Point, he 
had been in the Mexican War, he knew how to 
handle men, he knew how to fight, he was a 
trained soldier, and his whole past came into play 
when the great idea took possession of him. 
Nothing is wasted in human life when once a 
great idea takes hold of it. View the records of 
your sin, your shame, your folly, your weak- 
ness, your heartbreak, your despair, your atheism, 
and your inhumanity; they are all taken and 



152 REVELATION AND THE IDEAL 

converted into powder and shot in the hands of 
the sovereign, commanding ideal. 

What did this vision mean ? What was it at 
heart ? It was first of all the vision of God as 
the deliverer of men. This man had doubtless 
brooded deeply on the Eternal; he had been 
moved in wonder and joy as his mind was ab- 
sorbed and carried upward into the presence of 
the Infinite ; but it had not occurred to him that 
God, in the infinitude of his life, in the eternity 
of his being, could be concerned with the good 
and the evil, the right and the wrong, the injus- 
tice, the iniquity, and the woe of the world. 

If you think this strange, let me give you an 
instance. The strongest and the loftiest theist 
in the ancient world outside of our Biblical re- 
cords is the Greek, Aristotle. There is something 
amazing in the way in which he carries up the 
finite world, which he explores with a thorough- 
ness and mastery so great, to the Eternal Thinker 
as the beginning and the persistent cause of it 
all. But even this sincere and mighty theist con- 
tends that God has nothing to do with the moral 
life of the world; its justice or its injustice is of 
no consequence to him. There is the great defect 
in Aristotle's vision of God ; the concerns of the 
Eternal Being do not comprehend the profound-, 
est concerns of man. So Moses thought before 
his enlightenment; when he saw that God was 



TEE DELIVERER AND HIS IDEAL 153 

concerned with right and wrong, truth and false- 
hood, the oppressed and the oppressor, and with 
all the woe in the world, — his God became the 
living God. 

Something like this must happen to all genuine 
believers. Take the Scottish Chalmers. In his 
early life he was carried away by the vision of 
the almightiness of God ; he lived as in a dream ; 
his days were a rapture as he went about in the 
glory and peace of that thought. When he be- 
came minister of the Tron Church in Glasgow, 
with thousands of suffering, sinning, tragic human 
beings roundabout his church; when he went 
among them to look at them, to understand them ; 
when they became his concern, he no longer 
thought of God in the old way. He attained to 
a vision of the God, one of whose infinite concerns 
is with the sin and the woe of human hearts. We 
have no God till we come to this ; our God means 
nothing till He is in earnest ; we cannot honor 
Him till we know that He likes some things and 
that He does not like other things, till we know 
that He is on the side of the downtrodden and 
the oppressed. When we can say that our God 
is on the side of humanity, that He is there in 
behalf of truth and righteousness, kindness and 
mercy, then our God is great. Then we can sing 
with men of old that the stars in their courses 
fight for the righteous cause. 



154 REVELATION AND THE IDEAL 

This vision had still another meaning. Moses 
saw his people in a new light. He had always 
known of their sufferings and laid them to heart ; 
but when he saw that against the Infinite stood 
up the shadow of their woe, then that same shadow 
feU upon his own soul with deeper gloom. That 
which concerned God he felt must concern him. 
As he looked at his own wife and thought of her as 
the mother of his children, he would think of the 
wives of other men, the mothers of their children. 
As he saw his own children, he would think of the 
children of his race in bondage : he read the mean- 
ing of their calamity through the calamity that 
would be his were his home set in that cruel 
world. This is the way in which men think to- 
day, when they are alive ; they read the father- 
hood of the world through their own father ; the 
motherhood of the race through their own mother ; 
the childhood of the world through their own 
children; they take that portion of humanity 
which is dear to them and then ask themselves 
what would life be worth if their possession were 
under menace, outrage, and shame. They do this 
because they have faith in a God to whom iniquity 
is a horror and to whom righteousness is dear. 
This man got his initial impulse for a genuine 
sympathy with suffering from his faith in a 
righteous and compassionate God. If you look 
through the annals of the humanist who is not a 



THE DELIVERER AND HIS IDEAL 155 

man of faith, the philanthropist who has no be- 
lief in a universe sympathetic, toward man, who 
is able to draw no support out of the invisible 
for his best affections, how thin, how shallow, 
how impotent you find him to be. God help the 
race whose servants see no support in the uni- 
verse for their work ! Joy be to the race whose 
great leaders believe that God is with them, who 
sing with Luther, — 

" A mighty fortress is our God, 
A bulwark failing never ; 
Our helper he amid the flood 
O'er mortal ills prevailing." 

It is the universe as background that gives the 
final significance to the sympathies of the wise 
and the good. 

Something more calls for a word of emphasis. 
When Moses got his new vision of God, — his 
new vision of his suffering race, — he was ready, 
after a little struggle, to present himself as the 
servant and prophet of the Divine Deliverer. He 
could not take upon himself the woe of shutting 
out God from the race by refusing to be the 
servant of the Invisible. To this all disobedi- 
ence to the heavenly vision comes. If Moses 
had refused, if all those called to represent a 
delivering God to that people had refused, Israel 
would have died in bondage. Think of it ! We 
who are here now, if we are faithful to the great 



156 REVELATION AND THE IDEAL 

idea when it comes to us, let God into the 
world ; we open a sluiceway for the eternal 
waters to rush in ; if we are unfaithful to the 
great idea that would commission us, we dam 
the divine river back into the heart of God. 
When God calls for men to introduce Him to 
his world, those who obey let God in ; those 
who disobey, do their best to shut God out. I do 
not know any aspect of human life so tremendous 
as this ; there is nothing quite so overwhelming 
as the thought that if I refuse to follow the great 
idea, I to that extent keep God out of his world ; 
and if I follow with all my heart, for all my years, 
and for all I am worth, to that extent I let God 
in as the light and deliverance and consolation 
of the world. 

Great men are part of the supreme consolation 
of the world. To live with them is one of the 
rare privileges of mortal existence. The monu- 
mental minds to whom one must look up, in whose 
shadow one may rest, whose greatness one may 
feel upon one's spirit in a flood of light and peace, 
in whose high companionship one may make his 
pilgrimage through time, — what comfort, what 
security and delight are here. There are the 
sovereign intellects in every domain of human 
interest, the kings in philosophy, in science, in 
art, in poetry, and in religion. How great they 
are, and how they exalt and hallow the lives of 



THE DELIVERER AND HIS IDEAL 157 

common men. Here we think of men of action, 
men whose vision has become an achieving force 
in social and national life. Many races have had 
such men, and these peoples have found in them 
permanent and indeed inexhaustible satisfaction. 
Think what Pericles was to the Athenians; he 
was their pride, their Olympian man, their crown ! 
Think what Charles the Great was to the Franks ; 
there was another mighty name shining upon the 
centuries of human struggle and hope! Think 
what William the Silent was to the Dutch, — 
their great man, their joy, the source of their 
national strength in time of peril, their chief 
glory. At length. Englishmen, in spite of their 
blindness, in spite of their conventionality, are 
coming to rejoice in their greatest man, Oliver 
Cromwell ; during the next thousand years they 
will grow more and more into the comfort and 
renown of that imperial spirit. We have our 
Washington. Every time that I pass his superb 
statue in the Boston Public Garden, and look 
upon that splendid horse and that majestic 
figure, that finely poised head, and those great 
pure eyes looking out into the west in the glow 
of evening, I think not only of Washington's hap- 
piness, elected as he is to a service immeasureable; 
I think also of the joy and the strength, the honor 
and the inspiration of all Americans in the posses- 
sion of this leader and commander of the people. 



158 REVELATION AND THE IDEAL 

Such a leader and commander was Moses to 
the people of Israel through thirteen hundred 
years of life; he was to them the shadow of a 
great rock in a weary land ; he was a mind that 
lifted them from earth to heaven, a great, patient, 
serene spirit enduring in the wilderness of time, 
as seeing Him who is invisible, and at the end 
walking to his death in fellowship with the God 
who appeared to him in the burning bush, whom 
he had served and with whom he passed into the 
eternal silence and rest. 



XII 
THE IDEALIST UNDER FOUR ASPECTS 

" And the Lord came, and stood, and called as at other times, Samuel, 
Samuel. Then Samuel said, Speak, for thy servant heareth." 

1 Sam. in, 10. 

Four distinct epochs in the life of Samuel are 
implied in these words. There was the time when 
his heart was untroubled by any appreciable call, 
the time when the call that came was mistaken, 
the time when it was understood, and the time 
in which it repeated itself, in the clear conscious- 
ness of the servant of God, as the burden and 
song of his soul. The call unheard, the call heard 
but mistaken, the call heard and understood, the 
call received in one continuous and increasing 
voice ; — these are the four great epochs in this 
man^s life. They constitute the four great divi- 
sions and surprises of every truly religious soul. 
There is in every life the period of silence. There 
are no convictions, there are no responses, for 
the reason that there is no speaking universe for 
that life. Then follows the period in which voices 
ring out in the twilight and the awakened spirit 
rushes on into mistaken interpretations. But for 
the true man the process does not stop here. The 
great hour comes in which the voice of God is 



160 REVELATION AND THE IDEAL 

heard in an understanding heart. And in the case 
of the normal Christian life, to this succeeds the 
continuous and ever-increasing revelation. 

1. There is first of all the period of silence. 
God is doubtless in the silent life, but before his 
voice is heard, man is not man. Life does not 
really count for human until we know that God 
is speaking to us. There may be growth in it, 
there may be many good things in it, there may 
be a great preparatory movement of soul, but it 
is a sort of prenatal existence. 

This is the period when there is no open vision, 
when other men do our thinking for us, when we 
have no convictions of our own, when we are still 
in our spiritual minority, subject to tutors and 
guardians, in bondage to an authority whose rea- 
sonableness we do not see. This is the period in 
which the disciples follow Christ and yet have no 
vision of his Gospel, no insight into his purpose, 
no clear consciousness of their relation to Him. 
He speaks, but they do not hear; He unfolds his 
wonderful teaching in sermon and in parable, 
but they do not understand ; He works his divine 
acts of healing and deliverance, but the signifi- 
cance of these they do not take in. This is the 
period when Moses is a solitary shepherd in the 
Midian wilderness, when Isaiah is an unawakened 
worshiper in the Temple, when Jeremiah has not 
yet felt God's call tremble through his frail being, 



THE IDEALIST UNDER FOUR ASPECTS 161 

when Saul of Tarsus is still a Pharisee, when 
Luther is a faithful monk. It is the time when 
whatever religion there may be in the nature is 
wholly inherited, traditional, circumstantial. You 
see the keeper take from the cage a lion's cub. 
He fondles it as he would some domestic pet. 
You cannot think, as you look upon the harmless 
and helpless creature, of the terrible nature latent 
in it. It is almost impossible to imagine, as it 
clings to you and seeks shelter and comfort by 
pressing closer to you, that a lion's heart is beat- 
ing within. The truth is it is not yet a lion ; its 
whole great nature is unborn ; it is simply the 
possible monarch of the forest and king of beasts. 
There is a corresponding stage in every human 
life. The boy is not the man, the youth is not 
the man. The religious nature, fed from with- 
out, cared for by others, having its thinking done 
for it, its creed framed, its convictions moulded, 
its purpose determined, its activity directed by a 
happy environment, has not yet come to its hu- 
manity. It is the lion's cub ; it is not the lion. 

This period is inevitable and therefore can be 
no disgrace. It is simply immaturity. " When I 
was a child," so the apostle says, " I thought as 
a child, I felt as a child, I understood as a child." 
He could not help himself ; and all the more do 
we see the importance of the sweet and radiant 
environment for the immature spirit. Be sure 



162 REVELATION AND THE IDEAL 

that you support the silent God in the life of 
your child. The idea of God may not yet have 
dawned ; there may be no whisper of his power 
in the young soul, no consciousness may have 
arrived of his being, no thoughts may have 
grouped themselves round his name, but let us 
be sure that God is working in that silent life. 
Let the environment be full of faith and love, 
let it be pervaded by the sense of the sanctity of 
human life, let the forces of reverence and pity 
play through it like airs from heaven, let the 
whole power of home, education, recreation, com- 
panionship, and social pleasure be such as to sup- 
port the awful Presence that in the unconscious 
soul is seeking to shape a character in the image 
of Christ. The environment should be a sort of 
incubator. The bird is in the egg only as a pos- 
sibility ; it must be hatched and brought forth. 
When it has become a bird, it is in a fair way to 
take care of itself. The child, the boy, the youth 
is but the possible man. The incubating environ- 
ment is indispensable for the living and winged 
product. When one thinks of the waste of pos- 
sibility in the soul life of every generation, the 
psychological mortality among children greater 
far and sadder than physical death, the wide- 
spread and terrible failure to work with God in 
the silence and darkness of the immature spirit, 
one sees the wisdom and venerates the piety that 



THE IDEALIST UNDER FOUR ASPECTS 163 

took the child Samuel and placed him in the 
Temple. There amid great memories and great 
hopes, there among exalted ideals and hallowing 
associations, there in an environment with the 
unbelief and the brutality of the world reduced 
to their lowest forms, and with the forces that 
play upon the noble instincts as the sun plays 
upon the seed-plot in the spring, lifted to their 
best, let the prophetic child in whom the silent 
God is fashioning a great soul be always placed. 
2. The second period is the period of mistake. 
How faithfully and touchingiy this stage of spir-- 
itual existence is described in the chapter from 
which the text is taken. Three times the Divine 
Voice spoke to the young prophet, and three 
times it was misunderstood. The disturbing 
speech was supposed to come from the old priest. 
The words were distinctly heard, the response 
was swiftly made, but the bewildered soul went, 
to Eli instead of to God. Here there is progress, 
but it is pathetic progress. The spirit is awake,, 
it hears the mysterious call ; but no sooner is it 
awake, no sooner does it hear than it begins ta 
make mistakes. It is as if, in the case of the bee 
constructing its cell, the builder in instinct had 
died, and the architect in reason had not arrived. 
There is something profoundly touching in this 
failure to understand the highest in life, in this 
repeated, persistent, misguided reduction af the 



164 REVELATION AND THE IDEAL 

Supreme to the merely human. All our failures 
may be summed up in this. We interpret the 
great voices downward, we fail to lift our visita- 
tions to their eternal source. The day-spring from 
on high visits men ; and they look for the foun- 
tain of light and gladness, not in the prophetic 
heavens, but in the dull earth. In the wonder of 
childhood, in the strength and fire of youth, in 
the increasing burden and privilege of manhood 
and womanhood, in the sense of mystery that old 
age brings with it, in the days memorable for 
their brightness or for their heaviness, in the 
experiences that hold great joys and in those 
that enshrine great sorrows, in the entire warp 
and woof of existence, in its ideals, longings, 
achievements, disappointments, expectations, be- 
wilderments, sufferings, hopes, and despairs, the 
voice of God forever rings. And the pathetic 
thing is that we hear the voice and know not 
whose it is, that we take the call of the Highest 
to human weakness for interpretation, that we 
mistake the speech of God for the summons of 
the poor priest. Thus love and grief, recollection 
and anticipation are degraded; thus home and 
trade and social order, all fellowships and all 
brotherhoods are brought low ; thus the sublime 
mysteries of life and death become common and 
mean. It is like the apostles on the day of Pen- 
tecost. There they are, their entire nature flooded 



THE IDEALIST UNDER FOUR ASPECTS 165 

with new experiences ; there they stand, their "^ 
whole being possessed by a new passion. And 
there are the mockers who refer the sublime 
phenomenon to the effect of new wine. Pentecost 
is repeated over and over again, not only in the 
life of the Church, but on a vastly wider scale in 
the nature of man. The subjects of this divine 
visitation are themselves by turns the mockers 
who refer the heavenly inspiration to earthly 
sources, who confound the power of the Holy 
Ghost with the delirium wrought by appetite. 
Where men are clear of this sin, they still mis- 
take the call of the Lord for the summons of the 
priest. 

How do men treat the emergence of the moral 
ideal in the soul ? How do they construe its sub- 
lime appeal ? Do they lift it up to God or drag 
it down to personal peculiarity ? Do they treat 
it as the only real and indestructible possession 
of the soul, or do they admire it for a while, and 
then, finding that it clashes with the world, set 
it down as an illusion ? There is the soul of 
youth in the streets of our city running with the 
voice of the Highest ringing through it, from 
God to the priest. There is one terrible form of 
the great mistake — the dishonor, the degrada- 
tion of the ideal. How about the sense of sin ? 
" Remorse," as some one has said, " is an im- 
plicit preed." Conviction in the court of con- 



166 BEVELATION AND THE IDEAL 

science as a wrongdoer is a word, a call from 
God. How is that inward wound treated? Do 
the young prophets of our time try to forget it 
in evil company, through systematic self-indul- 
gence, by stifling the conscience, by unresting 
vagrancy of thought ? In the lives of these souls 
there is, as it were, a morgue with its dead bodies 
waiting to be owned and buried. The morgue is 
in a garden, and these young prophets play with 
their backs to the dreadful thing, look forth with 
delight upon the trees and the flowers, and listen 
with joy to the song of the birds. But the house 
of death is there, and no self-induced oblivion 
can make it disappear. It is the call of God to 
confess the sin and to be forgiven, to own the 
dreadful corpse and to bury it out of sight. 
How many refuse to do this. Here is another 
form of the tremendous mistake. The sense of 
sin is the keenest pain, and instead of going to 
God with it, men carry it to the poor earthly 
friend. 

There are other forms of this same fundamen- 
tal error. There is the form that is so apt to 
come in with the awakened power of thought. 
The young philosopher is so apt to dispense with 
the Lord, he is so often tempted to reduce all 
the high voices in his nature to the voice of the 
priest. Religion, sentiment, disinterested love, 
unselfish friendship, duty, social fellowship, and 



THE IDEALIST UNDER FOUR ASPECTS 167 

all the institutions which have risen as the 
servants of these things, the young thinker is 
tempted to explain without the intervention of 
the Absolute Wisdom and Goodness. For God 
he substitutes the priest. The universe is con- 
strued without reference to the Highest, and 
whatever mysteries seem to remain are to be 
carried to the poor slumbering Elis who fill all 
the comers of history, and who are especially 
potent when the lights are gone out. This is the 
form of the immemorial mistake into which the 
young thinker falls. He does not see the nature 
of the thing with which he is dealing, he does 
not discern the divine notes in the voice that he 
hears. He is awake, he is thinking, but he is in 
complete bewilderment. He has left the peace of 
authority, he has not yet won the peace of per- 
sonal vision. 

The form of the mistake that has blackened 
Christian history is the sinking of God in human 
feeling, instead of the purification of human 
feeling through God. Think of the hatreds, the 
fires, the persecutions that have flamed out of 
zeal for God degraded, carried down into the 
passions for interpretations. Who can read the 
long and dreadful annals of persecution without 
compassion for humanity ! It has taken its re- 
ligion, its highest, and turned it into a scourge 
of inexpressible fury upon millions of the race. 



168 REVELATION AND THE IDEAL 

What a blunder it has been, the attempt to con- 
trol by force the opinions of men, to burn those 
whom it has been impossible to convert. The 
only reason that I can see for the story of the sac- 
rifice of Isaac in our Bible is this ; it is God's 
warning against man's immemorial mistake. The 
call was for the sacrifice of the boy, the call was 
from God, but the bewildered father took the 
call for interpretation first of all to Moloch and 
not to Jehovah. That story is a monumental in- 
stance crying out against man's monumental 
weakness. 

3. We must date our full manhood from the 
hour in which we have known that God is speak- 
ing to us. This is the third epoch in life. When 
the conscience becomes king, the man is born ; 
and conscience means the knowledge that one 
has of one's self in the presence of God. Until 
the moral nature burns and smokes, and rolls 
forth its thunders and flashes its terrible light- 
nings; until the soul becomes a Mount Sinai, 
receiving, recording, and delivering the eternal 
law of God, the man is not born. 

Nowhere is this seen more clearly than in the 
early songs of Tennyson. There is little in them, 
because the moral nature of the poet is not awake. 
The great poet is yet to come, because the full 
man is yet to come. In all those early years 
there is much loveliness, wonderful sensitiveness 



THE IDEALIST UNDER FOUR ASPECTS 169 

to the beauty of nature and art, the power to 
revel in the charming fields of fancy. But the voice 
that afterwards shook the nation is not in them. 
" The Vision of Sin " breaks the silence. " The 
Two Voices " tell of the mistake and the brave 
endeavor to escape from it, the terrible sorrow 
in which doubt struggles into faith, and out of 
which " In Memoriam " comes, reveal a new mean. 
The poet is fully here when the man is here, and 
the man is here when the conscience is here. 

Think of the environment as it speaks for 
God. Here is the prophecy of youth itself, girt 
with peril as by the fires of hell. Here is the 
home with all its sanctity and happiness under 
the menace of brutality. Here is the nation with 
its great history, its great consciousness of op- 
portunity, its sublime destiny, and ten thousand 
evils preying upon its heart. Here is the human 
race set in the sunrise of a vast hope, with the 
day of the Lord before it for achievement, and 
fellowship, and black clouds gathering from the 
four winds of heaven to quench the light and 
send all things to utter wreck. Think of a young 
man in the dawn of Christianity, or in the apos- 
tolic age, or in the Reformation, or in the years 
of the American Revolution and the Civil War, 
and beholding the individual relation to right- 
eousness sweeping into world-wide significance, 
and still taking no share in the sublime struggle 



170 REVELATION AND THE IDEAL 

and hope. The case is impossible. The young 
men who see the reality of righteousness for the 
individual soul and who behold its universal 
scope cannot rest. They are men who have come 
to their manhood. For them the good of their 
own souls is the good of all souls, the good of 
the Infinite Soul. Their sword has been bathed 
in heaven, all man's genuine battles are God's 
battles. 

Those who see no visions of struggling right 
and audacious and impudent iniquity; those whose 
hearts do not occasionally swell with purpose and 
passion as they look upon the opportunity of life 
and its abuse, whose god is ease, or the narcotics 
of pleasure, who never take the field for the 
cause of humanity, are themselves not men. Not 
until with the Arab they can say, " Paradise lies 
in the shadow of our swords," will they be able 
to date the beginning of their manhood. 

4. The last great epoch remains for a passing 
word, the continuous and increasing revelation. 
What a crisis in the life of Samuel it was when 
he found that God was veritably speaking to 
him. It was the aboriginal fountain of his char- 
acter as a man. It was his first great introduc- 
tion to a man's supreme privilege, but it was only 
the first. It had in it a peculiar wonder and awe, 
it wrought mpre manifest changes in his spirit 
and in his whole thouo^ht of the world than other 



THE IDEALIST UNDER FOUR ASPECTS 171 

suljsequent visitations, but it was only the begin- 
ning of one continuous and ever-increasing reve- 
lation to his soul. We do well to linger upon the 
august beginning, but we must not stop there. In 
the discharge of lowly duty, in the resistance of 
temptation, in the growing capacity and in the 
greatening service, the voice of the Lord con- 
tinued to be heard. A new opportunity arose for 
Samuel when he became Judge of Israel ; a great 
sorrow came when the people wanted a king ; a 
great hope when the leader appeared in the 
prophetic Saul, a profound disappointment when 
Saul betrayed the magnificent promise of his 
reign ; a brighter future yet when the old man 
of God was sent to anoint David ; and a more 
terrible experience still awaited him when sum- 
moned to repeat upon his own sons the sentence 
of doom that he had spoken over Eli's sons ; and 
sublimest of all when he heard for the last time 
on earth, in the deepening twilight of death, the 
divine call. These great experiences of the prophet 
are the successive ascensions of his soul into a 
vaster faith, into a loftier character. 

In the normal Christian life revelation is like 
the day. The gates of morning once flung wide 
open, nothing can really stop the progress of the 
light. It fills the whole world, fills it more and 
more, piles up with every successive hour the 
evidences of its triumph, and back through the 



172 REVELATION AND THE IDEAL 

bars of evening comes the flush of a transcendent 
consummation. Paul saw Stephen die, and he 
was never the same man after that experience. 
He met the great light on his way to Damascus 
and it changed him forever. He retraced as a 
preacher all the lines along which he had gone 
as persecutor, and through each new baptism of 
suffering and achievement he came forth a larger 
and richer man. He faced in the Temple itseK 
as a Christian the old sect of the Pharisees to 
which he once gave his utmost devotion ; he stood 
before Caesar as the apostle of Christ, and on his 
way thither he endured the severest trials. His 
career was full of great events, and through each 
as it came a new and larger word from God was 
spoken to his heart. And when he went out be- 
yond the city walls to surrender life itself for 
his Master, he went with the voice of God ringing 
through his soul as it had never done in preceding 
days. Great words from God led on to greater, a 
lengthened chain of climaxes, like some mountain 
range culminated in the supreme consummation. 
We go over the same path, we meet with the 
same sort of trials, we are guided and inspired 
by the same Ineffable Speaker. The beginning 
of the Christian life is great, but it is only the 
beginning. Some new word waits for us in all 
the experiences that make up life. The serious 
student comes again and yet again upon some 



THE IDEALIST UNDER FOUR ASPECTS 173 

book that creates an epoch in his intellectual life. 
It should be the same with the spirit. The temp- 
tation of to-day, the duty of to-day, the oppor- 
tunity of to-day, the sorrow of to-day, the joy of 
to-day should be met with the expectation that it 
will leave us other than it found us — nobler, 
simpler, stronger, nearer the heart of God. This 
expectation, this experience, makes the circle of 
happenings amid which we go a spiral leading 
to new insight and assured advance. It is the 
St. Gotthard Tunnel ; we seem to come out of 
the same mountain and at the very place where 
we went in. And in a sense we do, but each time 
the emergence is at a higher point, and thus the 
circles that seem a play in the dark lead at last 
to the light on the supreme heights. This is the 
spiral of life. We go in at the old temptation, the 
old duty, the old monotonous task, and we come 
out to look upon the same things. But each circle 
is upon higher levels ; we go the old round at a 
new elevation, and we are brought at length to 
the summit of manhood, and the fuU day of the 
divine revelation. 

It is meet and right to give thanks over the 
silent God who works everywhere in the uncon- 
scious life of immaturity. It is our privilege to 
rejoice in the speaking God who stands and re- 
peats Himself, over all the mistake and rush and 
fury of youth. We shall take home the comfort 



\/ 



174 BEVELATION AND THE IDEAL 

of the thought that it is the speaking God that 
makes man's mistake so sad ; that it is the speak- 
ing God who is still in all the misguided stir, 
in all the misdirected activity, in all the fruit- 
less conclusions of young souls. Behind the 
awakening, back of the storm of thought and 
passion is the patient God repeating the divine 
call. Yet more shall we praise God when He 
brings the soul to recognize his presence, to hear 
Him speaking in the conscience and in the entire 
solemn order of existence, making the moral na- 
ture flame again with the sense of his law and 
dating the advent of the fall of man. But above 
all shall we give thanks that God's work goes 
on forever, that it takes us out of our sins, out 
of our weakness, out of our hidden selfishness, 
out of our half -consecrations, and exalts us in the 
passion of a new vision, a new surrender, and a 
new love. The dove that Noah sent out of the 
ark found an inhospitable world and soon came 
back. Sent forth again, it returned again, but 
this time with the evidence of change and the 
token of hope. Sent forth yet once more, it went 
on its new way in the new world forever. That 
unreturning dove is the symbol of that to which 
God will bring us at last. How we return again 
and again when God sends us forth ^ to our old 
luxuries, our old indulgences, our old narrow- 
nesses, our old sins. How we return to our 



THE IDEALIST UNDER FOUR ASPECTS 175 

meagre thoughts about God, our mean plans for 
his kingdom, our poor outlooks, and our barren 
rest. How full of these dreadful retrogrades our 
lives are. How few of our sins, our follies, our 
weaknesses, we have ever finally abandoned. We 
are like the poor vagrant who after serving each 
new sentence turns up in court to be sentenced 
again for the same old crime. Shall these miser- 
able, heartbreaking retrogrades into our past and 
worst selves never cease? Yes. God brings his 
faithful messenger to the eventful morning and 
forth he flies, leaving forever behind him the 
dead and bad past. The epoch in which these 
dismal retrogrades come to an end, in which the 
soul escapes from itself, in which it makes a new 
and momentous beginning, in which it dates a 
forth-going, unreturning flight over God's world 
and in God's might, is the epoch that awaits the 
steadfast will. 



XIII 
THE IDEALIST FALLEN 

" And it was so that when he had turned his back to go from Samuel, 
God gave him another heart." 

1 Sam. X, 9. 

On the way from Jerusalem to Bethlehem, the 
little village is pointed out where tradition says 
that Saul was born, and where he grew to man- 
hood. Three thousand years have come and gone 
since Saul wandered over those Judaean hills. 
All trace of his existence has vanished. The 
places that knew him, know him no more for- 
ever. But the same sun that Saul beheld stiU 
travels daily over those hills and looks benignly 
down upon them. The solemn moon and the 
sweet stars that Saul saw still shine upon those 
hills, and they seem to wear in their bright faces 
some image of the first king of the people, deeper 
in the imagination and closer to the heart of 
mankind than any other people in aU history. 
Saul, therefore, comes out of the earth beneath 
and from the high places above us, as we travel 
through that wondrous land. 

1. The first point of universal interest in the 
career of Saul is the light which his life throws 
upon the character of the community in which he 



THE IDEALIST FALLEN 177 

lived. His career shows that the character of 
that community was essentially democratic. Its 
highest offices were open to young men of extra- 
ordinary power, from the humblest families in 
the land. Saul was a member of a humble fam- 
ily ; he came of one of the least of the tribes of 
Israel ; but he was a man of extraordinary per- 
sonality, of extraordinary talent, and on this ac- 
count the highest place, the office of king, was 
accessible to him. This was true of his illustri- 
ous successor. The greatest political genius of 
the race of Israel was David, and he came from 
the sheepfolds to the throne ; another proof of 
the statement that the highest places were open 
to youth of genius from the humblest ranks of 
society. The great office of prophet teaches the 
same thing. The office of prophet was only second 
to the office of king, if, indeed, it was not supe- 
rior in point of influence over the people ; and 
this office was accessible to every prophetic gen- 
ius in the land, from the highest family to the 
humblest. This law in the life of Israel goes far 
to explain the transcendent development of the 
people through five hundred years of incompa- 
rable history. 

What is our greatest hope for the perpetuity 
of the American Republic ? It lies in the fact 
that the highest offices in the land are accessible 
to the humblest youth of extraordinary talent 



178 REVELATION AND THE IDEAL 

and genius. What is the everlasting significance 
of the presidency of Abraham Lincoln ? That 
one, born where he was, with his wonderful but 
hidden genius, was discovered by the United 
States and made their ruler. No nation can fail 
in whose life that insight abides. So long as the 
highest station and the widest opportunity are 
open to the best minds in each generation, the 
Republic will last and prosper. When a college, 
a state, or a church becomes inaccessible to the 
best intellect ; when it refuses to be recast by the 
highest minds, its doom is sealed. 

Let a church exclude from its ministry the 
finest spirits ; let it fall into the hands of men 
commonplace in mind, commonplace in charac- 
ter, and it takes no great insight to discern the 
sure decadence of that church. A great Ameri- 
can educator in speaking of Scottish universities 
pointed to their accessibility to the elect youth 
of the land as one of their chief characteristics. 
The same remark holds of the church in that 
country. A farmer's boy, in the county of Aber- 
deen, became the chief Biblical scholar of his gen- 
eration, and with hardly a break or jar changed 
the entire church from the older view of the Bible 
to the modern. From the homes of farmers, min- 
ers, mechanics, and policemen, from the hum- 
blest families all over that land come in each 
generation many of the leading scholars and men 



THE IDEALIST FALLEN 179 

of f ower. That nation, that church, that institu- 
tion is founded on a reasonable hope of perma- 
nence and prosperity which is open to elect 
minds from the four winds of heaven. 

2. The second point of universal significance 
in the career of Saul is the fact that his high 
calling wrought within him a great moral change. 
He had been communing with a prophet. This 
prophet had called him in the name of the people 
to be the people's king, and as Saul left the 
prophet, with a vision of his duty and of his priv- 
ilege, his whole nature underwent a change ; he 
broke forth in prophecy ; his spirit rose to in- 
sight and song. Here is an event of universal 
moment. The way to bring forth the grandeur 
of our human nature is not to fiddle with trifles 
or fool with mere pleasures ; to bring forth all 
that is truly great in man, we must fill the mind 
with the vision of the duty that is a privilege and 
the privilege that is a duty. 

Daniel Webster describes with deep emotion 
the noble manner in which his father told him, 
then a boy of fifteen, that he was about to send 
him to college. Webster says he could never 
forget the spot in the road where his father sur- 
prised and overwhelmed him with the good news, 
and when the vision of an educated manhood 
with all its privileges and responsibilities took 
possession of him, he burst into tears ; his nature 



180 REVELATION AND THE IDEAL 

began to put forth new power. How often a 
mother first comes to know the heart of her boy 
when she invites him to sit in the chair made va- 
cant by his dead father, when she asks her son 
to help her to take care of the younger children. 
She sees again the mind under the vision of a 
duty that is a solemn privilege and of a privilege 
that is a holy duty. The Greeks had a m3^th 
about the statue of Memnon, the great and beau- 
tiful statue that stood on the banks of the Nile ; 
they said that when the first beams of the rising 
sun touched it, the statue broke into music and 
song. Our human nature, when it is touched by 
insight, by the revealing light of a great ideal, 
becomes conscious of new power ; when it is 
struck by the sense of duty and by the sense of 
privilege, it awakes to new ranges of being ; it 
becomes a prophetic nature. 

The noble beginning of Saul's life as described 
in the great words, " God gave him another 
heart," was not a possession forever ; it was the 
promise of a possession forever. It was not some- 
thing that had come to stay, no matter what 
might happen or how he might behave. It was 
something that had come to work with might for 
him if he should regard it with the utmost care. 
When you look at an apple orchard in the 
spring, and see every bough on every tree covered 
with blossoms, you behold promise, exquisite and 



THE IDEALIST FALLEN 181 

abundant promise, but no more. Months inter- 
vene between that beautiful promise and the 
harvest-time, and much may happen. These in- 
tervening months are uncertain ; when the or- 
chard is fairest with promise, you cannot allow 
yourself to forget the conditional future. So it 
is with our life. When some new vision works 
in the understanding, when new and noble im- 
pulses stir within the heart, when a high and se- 
rious purpose lives in the will, the cause of youth 
is not won, its happiness is not secure. We can 
only say the beginning is fair, it is a prophetic 
beginning. We cannot go beyond that. The 
point of interest in Saul's career, as that career 
is indicated in the text, is precisely here — he 
began well, the beginning was rich with prophecy. 

3. This brings me to the third aspect of uni- 
versal moment in the career of Saul. His life was 
a tragedy ; it was a tragedy with many noble ele- 
ments in it, with great fountains of tenderness, 
great depths of pathos, great elevations of soul ; 
still it was a tragedy. There are to my mind five 
forms of tragic experience, and in order to place 
Saul's life as it should be placed, I must say a 
word or two on each of these five forms. 

The first form of tragedy is mistake. The 
Greeks thought that this was the essence of all 
tragedy. The greatest tragic artist of the ancient 
world was Sophocles, and he has put mistake at 



182 REVELATION AND THE IDEAL 

the heart of his greatest tragedies ; perhaps we 
should say that the tragic event is regarded as 
mistake from the human point of view, and as 
fate from the objective and universal point of 
view. Take that tremendous tragedy, " CEdipus 
the King." The nameless horror of it comes out 
of a fundamental and terrible mistake. CEdipus 
mistook the man whom he met and with whom he 
quarreled ; he did not know that he was fighting 
his father ; he did not know that he had killed 
his father. The whole majesty and preternatural 
gloom of that great tragedy is developed out of 
.the heart of mistake. The seven extant tragedies 
of Sophocles, in one form or another, have mis- 
take as an aspect of tragic motive ; they are very 
great in their power ; they are close to life to-day ; 
they hold the mind of the reader, even in an Eng- 
lish translation, as no other tragedies do, except 
those of Shakespeare. 

This form of tragedy is recognized in the New 
Testament. Paul said, " I did it ignorantly in 
unbelief." The tragedy in his early life was the 
tragedy of mistake. Our Lord, in his last prayer, 
said, " Father, forgive them, for they know not 
what they do." We see here into the heart of that 
awful tragedy ; that, too, came of mistake. Poor 
souls, they were nailing to the cross one whom 
they took to be the supreme malefactor and he 
was the King of the race. They did not know it. 



THE IDEALIST FALLEN 183 

Still again our Lord said, addressing those who 
had rejected his divine wisdom : " If thou hadst 
known in this day even those things that belong 
to thy peace; but now they are hid from thy 
sight." 

Do not say that mistakes mean little. Think 
of the horror that may come out of them. The 
other day, by mistake, a switch was left open and 
a flying express was wrecked ; it was wrecked by 
a tremendous mistake. The tragedy of mistake is 
repeated every day, with residts that range from 
the trivial to the tragic. Through mistake the 
race rolls forward in sorrow with the years. 

The second form of tragedy is that of prema- 
ture death, a form of tragedy transfigured in 
some of the sweetest affections and dearest hopes 
that visit the human heart. The death of children 
is tragic ; all the love that came with them be- 
reaved, all the high hopes reversed in a moment. 
The death of youth about to go into life, equipped 
by fine education, by high character for great 
service, is tragic ; glorious youth struck down in a 
moment. The premature death of men of supreme 
genius belongs under this form of tragedy. Ra- 
phael dies at thirty-six ; what might he not have 
done if he had lived, as Michael Angelo did, to 
eighty and over ; Keats dies at twenty-six ; Shel- 
ley dies at thirty ; Robert Burns at thirty-seven. 
They call up a host of the greatest spirits who 



184 REVELATION AND THE IDEAL 

died in youth. It is a form of the tragedy of the 
world that is perhaps the hardest to understand. 
A third form of the tragic condition is out- 
ward calamity. This is given with unequaled 
power in the prologue to the Book of Job, where 
a prosperous and a godly man, with a family of 
happy children, is smitten in a moment and his 
fair world goes to utter wreck. You see this man 
sitting down, in dialogue with his own soul, in 
the universal and awful desolation. That form of 
tragedy is current all the world over ; the tragic 
element is in the reversal of circumstances. Chil- 
dren born in luxury are cast out into homes of 
poverty ; boys and girls trained to spend and not 
to earn are sent forth in opening manhood and 
womanhood to fight the world unprepared ; hard- 
est of all, old age bereft of all — 

" Old age and want, 
O ill-matched pair! " 

The fourth form of tragedy is found in the sub- 
human life. There are many people that never 
come to a realization of their humanity; they 
never seem to rise into the experiences distinc- 
tive of their race ; and this failure to rise into the 
life proper to human beings has two forms. The 
first is stupidity. Persons of this class are fairly 
good, but they are too stupid to think, to look be- 
fore and after, or even to pine for what is not. 
Their life is sub-human because their intelligence 



THE IDEALIST FALLEN 185 

is unawakened. They are like the fish that never 
come to the surface and never look up into the 
great world above the deep in which they live. 
Do you not know people of that description? 
They exist in multitudes all over this broad and 
enlightened land of ours ; they are asleep in the 
whole upper register of their being. 

The second form of this sub-human life is greed, 
unfathomed greed, devouring and desolating ava- 
rice. You recall the story of the seven lean kine 
that came up out of the Nile. First there were 
the seven well-favored kine that came up and fed 
on the flags on the bank of the river ; then there 
followed seven lean, hungry kine, and these de- 
voured the others. That story sets before us 
multitudes all over the world ; they are one vast, 
howling appetite; one great ravening maw; their 
greed is elemental and monumental. They are 
not men ; they resemble some monstrous beast 
and its insatiable appetite. Is it not tragic to 
think of the submerged humanity in business, in 
social life, in politics, and along all the ways of 
pleasure ? Some kind soul, reckless of grammar, 
asked a friend concerning a certain person, " Is 
he alive yet?" The inevitable answer came, 
"Not yet." 

The fifth form of tragedy is the fall of the 
Idealist. Mistake, premature death, outward 
calamity, and the sub-human life lead up to the 



186 REVELATION AND THE IDEAL 

tragedy in the career 'of the man who had his glo- 
rious outfit of ideality, his splendid love for it, 
his consecration to its service in the dew of his 
youth and the beauty of his manhood, and who 
after all falls away, denies the ideal, blasphemes 
it, and goes down at last in darkness and death. 
That is Saul. Saul when he went out from Samuel 
looked like the sun coming up in the morning, 
cloudless, wearing his glory about his consecrated 
head ; the last time we see Saul is the night be- 
fore his final battle on the great plain of Esdrae- 
lon, at the foot of the mountains of Gilboa. The 
passage in the Bible descriptive of that night is 
one of the most impressive and powerful in the 
literature of the world. You see this magnificent 
man, whose nature has become distorted, who 
has become jealous, cruel, insane, confronted 
with a vast crisis in the national life, with his 
enemies embattled there against him ; he is con- 
scious that his army is demoralized and unfit to 
meet the army of the enemy on the morrow; he 
returns to the morning of his life, when he spok^ 
with the prophet and communed with him on the 
house-top in the spring of the day, and went away 
in royal strength and hope. He remembers that 
there is a poor witch at Endor spared from the 
general persecution, and in the darkness of the 
night he makes his way to consult, through this 
poor impostor, the soul of the dead Samuel. The 



THE IDEALIST FALLEN 187 

whole thing is so squalid, so wretched, so irra- 
tional, so degrading to a king. He staggers out 
of the witch's home to the field of battle in the 
morning. The sole redeeming feature of the last 
sad scene is the way in which Saul died : he died 
with his harness on his back ; he died like a man, 
fighting for the liberty and stability of his coun- 
try ; he died with his beloved son, Jonathan. 
And there they lay dead together ; the glorious 
idealist, broken, in defeat and his death a sym- 
bol of the degeneration of his life. Shakespeare 
tells the tragic tale in his great words : — 

" Full many a glorious morning have I seen 
Flatter the mountain-tops with sovereign eye, 
Kissing with golden face the meadows green, 
Gliding pale streams with heavenly alchemy; 
Anon permit the basest clouds to ride 
With ugly rack on his celestial face, 
And from the forlorn world his visage hide, 
Stealing unseen to west with this disgrace." 

This is the way that Saul went, " Stealing un- 
seen to west with this disgrace." 

How can we avert this contempt of the beauty 
of life and the living God ? By fundamental se- 
riousness of character, by loving devotion to our 
cause, by fidelity to every duty, great and small ; 
by continually renewing our strength out of the 
great ideals in the community. You do not need 
to go to church, says your friend. If you have a 
vision, if you have a love for it, if you have 



188 REVELATION AND THE IDEAL 

a consecrated manhood to maintain in this awful 
world, you need to go to church, you need to read 
your Bible, you need to pray, you need to seek 
God. If you are wise you will be ready for every 
word of power that comes to you from every 
point of the compass, from every lofty human 
soul ! You and I are unsafe unless we are hungry 
for help every day ; help from the hills ; help 
from the Highest ; help from our brothers at our 
side ; help from history ; help from the kingdom 
of love. The greatest assurance of all is every 
day to wrestle with the Highest and to cry out 
with one of old, " I will not let thee go, except 
thou bless me ! " When our arms are round the 
God of love, and we are girded by his, when our 
nature is gathering protection out of the Eternal, 
we may be sure that we shall not fail ; that while 
our lives may fall under other forms of tragedy, 
they will embody the denial of the ideal never. 



XIV 
THE IDEALIST AS TEACHER 

" In the year that king Uzziah died I saw also the Lord sitting upon a 
throne, high and lifted up, and his train filled the temple. 

" Above it stood the seraphim : each one had six wings ; with twain he 
covered his face, and with twain he covered his feet, and with twain 
he did fly. 

" And one cried unto another, and said, Holy, holy, holy, is the Lord of 
hosts : the whole earth is full of his glory. 

" And the posts of the door moved at the voice of him that cried, and the 
house was filled with smoke. 

" Then said I, Woe is me ! for I am undone ; because I am a man of un- 
clean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips : for mine 
eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts." 

Is. VI, 1-5. 

There are two ways in which we may read the 
recorded thought of the great minds of the past. 
We may read the entire record, linger upon it 
in detail, go over it many times, brood it pa- 
tiently and lovingly, until the whole body of 
thouojht enshrined in that record rises before us 
as our precious possession forever. When time 
and strength allow, that is the ideal way to read 
the record of monumental minds. And I must 
here add that if one would secure for himself the 
highest kind of intellectual training, he must se- 
lect one such mind and read it as I have said it 
should be read, until the reader becomes possessor 
of his master. Time and strength, however, do 
not allow this in many cases ; therefore, we have 



190 REVELATION AND THE IDEAL 

another way of reading the great minds, and that 
is by selection of their representative utterances, 
selection of that part of the record which contains 
in a summary way the total thought for which 
they stood. As great minds are forever increas- 
ing in number, even for scholars, for men whose 
whole time is devoted to this vocation, it becomes 
necessary to work upon this principle of wise 
selection. If you cannot read the whole of Ten- 
nyson, read some representative part, — " In 
Memoriam," for example, and the profound and 
tender experience out of which the poem came ; 
then you will know, if not the whole of Tenny- 
son, yet the stronger and the deeper side of the 
great poet. If you can read but little of Carlyle, 
read the three great chapters in " Sartor Resar- 
tus," " The Everlasting No," "The Point of In- 
difference," and " The Everlasting Yea." These 
three chapters contain the whole of Carlyle's 
message to the world, his gospel of work and his 
vision of the meaning of the universe. Few to-day 
care to read all the writings of Augustine ; let 
one read the opening pages of " The City of God " ; 
the vision there is very great, greater than any- 
thing else in the book ; there is, too, " The Con- 
fessions of Augustine," one of the most precious 
documents in the world, bringing down from that 
fifth century of 6ur era the best in one of the 
greatest souls that ever lived. If you cannot read 



THE IDEALIST AS TEACHER 191 

all that Paul the Apostle wrote, go with him on 
his journey to Damascus ; stand by him as he 
receives his vision of the risen Lord ; watch the 
transformation which that vision wrought in his 
character and career; read those great things in 
his writings that bear upon this experience. 
Kead all Isaiah if you can, the thirty-nine chap- 
ters, which, with a few exceptions, modern schol- 
ars attribute to him ; read them all if you can ; 
you will find them all characterized by Robert 
Burns in his great line, " rapt Isaiah's wild ser- 
aphic fire." If you cannot read aU that this 
prophet has written, take this sixth chapter con- 
taining his vision of God. In compressed form 
you wiU find there his total philosophy of human 
life, the outline of his view of man and man's 
universe. It is to this vision and its relation to 
all time, especially to our time, that I invite 
your attention. There are four questions con- 
cerning this vision which I will state and try to 
answer. 

1. Where was Isaiah when this vision came 
to him ? He was in the Temple ; as we should 
say, in church, in the institution of religion. 
Here we make a great discovery. All places on 
this earth have not the same value for the human 
soul. Some places have immense power to pro- 
voke certain trains of thought ; certain trains of 
thought return upon certain places to glorify 



192 REVELATION AND THE IDEAL 

them. You go into that great mausoleum in Paris, 
where the mightiest soldier of the French race 
rests, where the French people have built their 
sense of national victory and national tragedy 
into monumental form; you descend into the 
crypt of St. Paul's Cathedral, and you look upon 
the resting-place of Nelson, that mightiest lord 
of the sea, and the resting-place of Wellington, 
that greatest commander of the English race ; 
you go to that other mausoleum on the banks of 
the Hudson, where rest the mortal remains of the 
great citizen-soldier that led the armies to victory 
in the war for the Union ; in each of these places 
you do not feel obliged to compel thought ; you 
are at once in the power of certain thoughts and. 
your heart swells with feelings that you cannot 
resist. The place inspires the thought ; the place 
fills the heart with unwonted feehng. The grog- 
shop, the gambling-den, the low theatre do not 
lead to the divine vision of the universe ; these 
places have no value for the soul. The psalmist 
said, " Till I went into the sanctuary " ; that place 
had a power over his spirit possessed by no other. 
We lay it down as a principle that certain places 
inspire kindred trains of thought, kindred ideas 
return to glorify certain places. 

What is the glory of the church : its ceremo- 
nial, its ritual ? No, its vision of God. There was 
power enough in this vision which came to Isaiah 



THE IDEALIST AS TEACHER 193 

in the Jewish Temple to hallow that temple for 
a thousand years. What do you think the churches 
of this country need most to-day, more ritual, 
more ceremonial ? Nay ; but a prof ounder and 
more jjotent vision of the living God. If these 
churches were places of intense, original, and 
vital vision, do you not think they would stand 
in the mind of our fellow-citizens everywhere as 
venerable, exalted, beautiful, divine? 

2. Our second question is, How did this vision 
come ? It came when Isaiah was at church ; how 
did it come ? By the whole strength of his life. 
He inherited his faith ; he inherited great tradi- 
tions, great ideas, a great history. He had received 
a distinctive education as an Israelitish boy; 
he had experiences of a definite type as an Isra- 
elitish youth ; love for his country, a sense of the 
troubled and distracted condition of it in his own 
time, a sense of prophetic forces working within 
it, a sense of impending calamity wrought to- 
gether in his soul. With this inheritance and 
this education and this confused, troubled, and 
tremendous experience he went to the Temple ; 
like a flash from heaven inheritance, education, 
and experience came forth in this august vision 
of God ; it came up out of life ; it was the crys- 
tallization of his entire being. 

All this goes on in our world to-day ; some- 
times it is in sorrow. You read that saying of 



194 REVELATION AND THE IDEAL 

Job as he stands in the utter wreck of his life, 
in the utter desolation that has come upon him, 
" The Lord gave and the Lord hath taken away ; 
blessed be the name of the Lord." That vision 
of God, to be blessed in sorrow, to be trusted to 
the uttermost, is simply the clarifying, the bring- 
ing into unity and glory of his whole past exist- 
ence. Sometimes this vision comes to a man in 
his sin, as in the parable of the lost son. He 
came to himself. There is a history of bitter 
shame and woe behind that experience ; he came 
to himself, and when he came to himself he said, 
" I will arise and go to my father." All that was 
best in his past life flashed into clearness and 
rose into decision that moment ; the decision and 
the vision came from his own soul. Sometimes 
the vision comes in thinking of a profession, as 
one of the apostles says, " Woe is me, if I preach 
not the Gospel." You cannot understand the woe, 
the sense of necessity, that lay upon Paul unless 
you think of him as loving righteousness from 
the cradle, as going like a hurricane in search of 
righteousness all through his youth, as being fas- 
cinated with the Gospel first of all because it 
brought to him an assurance that he might find 
the righteous life. It is this history that explains 
the sense of necessity that lay on him to go and 
preach the Gospel to the ends of the earth. You 
have been at sea and have been overtaken by fog ; 



THE IDEALIST AS TEACHER 195 

day after day tlie gloom hung round you and you 
wondered whether the sun would ever shine upon 
your course again. All at once the wind shifted 
to the northwest, and almost before you could 
announce the fact to your fellow-passenger, the 
air was clear and the sun was out in its strength. 
We go into sacred places with our whole past ; 
a new something is added which dissipates the 
confusion, which banishes the trouble, which puts 
a clear course before us and a transfigured uni- 
verse round us. 

3. This vision came in the Temple out of 
Isaiah's soul. What did it mean? That is our 
third great question. Where it came is a signifi- 
cant commentary on the value of places for a 
man's soul ; how it came is a significant comment 
on the value of inheritance, education, and expe- 
rience ; what it meant leads us to the very heart 
of the matter. What did this vision mean? It 
meant the vision of God as the moral judge of 
the world, living in the world as a judicial pro- 
cess, as a judicial spirit ; it meant at the same 
time the vision of God as infinitely above the 
work, as the eternal, moral reserve of the uni- 
verse. 

God is first of all the judicial spirit, the ju- 
dicial deity searching our entire world. God is 
in the conscience of every man ; He is in the 
heart of every man ; He is in the will of every 



196 REVELATION AND THE IDEAL 

man ; He is in the character and inmost soul of 
every man as approving or as protesting against 
the life there. " Where no eye can see, he be- 
holds ; v^here no ear can hear, he hears." He is 
the Soul in the souls of all men, comprehending 
all, searching all, judging all, recording all, hold- 
ing all to an eternal accountability ; like the force 
of gravity which lives in all the planets, in all 
the suns, in all the constellations, which is in the 
whole body of the material universe, so the most 
worthy Judge Eternal lives in the ideals, in the 
conscience, in the heart, in the wiU, in the char- 
acter, in the being of mankind. The immanent 
God ; that is the first half of Isaiah's message ; 
the indweUing Judge infallible, the process of 
judgment and the Spirit of judgment in the life 
of the world. That is one half of Isaiah's mes- 
sage to mankind ; a marvelous, a tremendous 
message ; he speaks not of a judgment day at the 
end of the world, but of the Soul of judgment in 
the soul of the race. 

The other aspect of Isaiah's vision is of the 
God who is above the world ; here the vision is 
of the transcendent deity, the infinite moral re- 
serve of the universe, the Incomprehensible, the 
Ineffable. How shall we represent this to our- 
selves? Here is the air that we breathe every 
day and upon which we live ; it searches us through 
and through; it is in our brain, in our blood, in 



THE IDEALIST AS TEACHES 197 

our bone, in our tissue ; it is moving within us, 
a spirit of life ; yet it is an infinite reserve. The 
respiratory organs of the whole race could never 
exhaust this infinite benignity that is roundabout 
us, this excess, this reserve of life. That is God. 
God in the soul of the world, all eye, all ear, all 
judicial integrity, Infallible Watcher and Re- 
warder of men. Beyond that there is the infinite 
excess of deity, the boundless moral reserve, the 
eternal transcendent God. This is the message 
of Isaiah in its completeness. Do you wonder that 
his race called him great, that all men in all gen- 
erations have called him great ? He is great who 
first saw God filliug the vast concave of human 
life, who saw beyond the power of humanity to 
contain God, the eternal excess of integrity and 
benignity. The Greek philosopher, Aristotle, 
made one of the profoundest remarks in all his- 
tory upon this double aspect of the divine being ; 
in dwelling upon it we are dwelling upon the cen- 
tral thought of the last hundred years of the 
deepest minds in Europe and in America. This 
Greek philosopher says that God is in the world 
as a general is in his army, through the disci- 
pline which he has put into his army ; again He 
is apart from the world as the general is apart 
from the army. You here see immanence and 
transcendence each completing the other ; the 
two great ideas of God belong together ; God is 



198 REVELATION AND THE IDEAL 

in the world and He is an infinite excess beyond 
the world ; God is near to us ; " Closer is he than 
breathing, and nearer than hands and feet " ; the 
heart of our heart, the soul of our soul, the life 
of our life, with whom we are in dialogue every 
day ; God is the Transcendent, the Eternal, the 
Ineffable. How near, and how far ! His hand is 
in our hand, his face is turned toward our face ; 
yet his glory is beyond finite thought. 

4. Our fourth question is. For what end was 
this vision given? Perhaps we may recall the 
course of thought through the simplicity of these 
four questions. Where? How? What? For 
what? The last question is, as I have said, for 
what? For the renewal of personal and national 
character ; that was the end of the vision. This 
end had two immediate results upon the prophet 
and upon his people. The first was despair; 
utter prostration and woe in the presence of the 
glorious ideal hung up before him in his vision 
of God. " Woe is me," he said, " woe is me, for I 
am undone ; because I am a man of unclean lips, 
and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean 
lips ; for mine eyes have seen the King, the Lord 
of hosts." Here is one of the greater experiences 
of the sublime souls of our race. The first vision of 
the ideal brings despair ; the vision is crushing, 
it is an avalanche of woe. Paul cries, " O wretched 
man that I am " ; the publican in the Temple 



THE IDEALIST AS TEACHER 199 

whispers, " God be merciful to me a sinner " ; 
Peter cannot bear the sense of the sinless One, 
" Depart from me, for I am a sinful man, O 
Lord." The initial experiences of every deep- 
hearted Christian are far from unmixed joy; 
they are clouded, they are touched with bitter 
grief ; his heart is often filled with woe. That 
Eternal Ideal seems such an impossible Master; 
we can never be what that glory exacts and 
commands us to be. Think of the number of 
our fellow-men who go down here, who are mor- 
ally broken-hearted; they lost all confidence, 
they could no longer look up. Look at them as 
they go through the world, each one sighing, 
" Woe is me, for I am undone ; because I am a 
man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of 
a people of unclean lips ; for mine eyes have seen 
the King, the Eternal Ideal." 

There is another aspect to the mystery ; the 
end for which the vision came has a further in- 
fluence upon the prophet beautifully told in his 
own great words. One of the seraphim heard 
this wail of woe from the prophet's heart, this 
cry of despair as he feU in the presence of the 
Eternal Ideal ; as the minister and servant of 
the Ideal, this seraph took a coal from off the 
altar and touched the prophet's lips. The touch 
of fire is the symbol of the touch of the Ideal; 
as fire purifies, so the simple vision of the Ideal 



200 REVELATION AND THE IDEAL 

brings at last purity and hope. An apostle in 
Patmos had a vision of an angel standing in the 
sun, a moral being in the heart of moral fire, a 
man perpetuated and purified by the ideal in 
which he stood. 

The experience of despair is deep and true, 
but it is not the entire history of the prophetic 
soul. Keep your eyes aloft; keep your mind 
open. Dare to look upon the Eternal Ideal ; 
through despairing love, devotion, penitence, 
tears, it will sweep its holy fire in upon you and 
surround you tiU at last you shall be that spiritual 
splendor in the heart of infinite spiritual splen- 
dor. Christ in you the hope of glory; God over 
all blessed forever ; the pledge of humanity's re- 
demption, the eternal call of the Highest; this 
is our faith. 



XV 

THE IDEALIST REJECTED 

" Oh that my head were waters, and mine eyes a fountain of tears, 
that I might weep day and night for the slain of the daughter of my 
people." 

Jeb. IX, 1. 

Jeremiah is the most pathetic and the most beau- 
tiful figure in the entire company of the Hebrew 
prophets. His fundamental character seems to 
have been an extreme and exquisite sensitive- 
ness combined with the utmost conscientiousness 
issuing in the sternest fidelity to duty. Four 
great feelings appear to have coursed through 
his life from the beginning to the end. The first 
was his feeling of the unapproachable glory, the 
transcendent loveliness and impossibility of the 
moral ideal. He seemed in its presence a child 
called to do the work of a man. The ideal was 
beautiful, it was adorable, but it seemed to him 
impossible. His second feeling was of the enor- 
mous and unspeakable iniquity of his time. His 
people were drunk with iniquity. They were de- 
voted to wrongdoing. They ran toward an evil 
goal like flooded water-courses. His third feeling 
was the sense that he was foreordained to failure 
as a prophet of the Lord. Th« prophets who 
would speak pleasant words to a people devoted 



202 REVELATION AND THE IDEAL 

to wrongdoing would become popular and power- 
ful. Such a people would not listen to his honest, 
searching, terrible words, and he had no other 
words to utter to his time. Therefore, he felt 
that his prophetic career was a foreordained and 
pitiful vanity. His fourth feeling was that in 
consequence of this tragic condition of his time 
his life was dedicated to sujffering. He was de- 
spised and rejected of men ; a man of sorrows 
and acquainted with grief. The suffering was to 
be lifelong and to enter into his inmost soul. 
His life was to end in a violent death at the 
hands of his misguided and cruel countrymen, 
whom he had tried in vain to rescue from their 
doom. 

These four feelings open the way into the soul 
of this wonderful man : his sense of the moral 
ideal; his perception of the wickedness of his 
time ; his consciousness of his foredoomed failure ; 
his certainty of the life of suffering and death 
from violence that awaited him. These tremen- 
dous feelings pervaded his entire career; they 
pervade his whole work ; they go far to account 
for the richness of it, the nobility, the beauty, 
and the infinite tenderness of it. Here and now 
we are concerned with him as the type of the 
idealist in defeat ; as the idealist in defeat I have 
two questions to ask and to answer concerning 
him. 



THE IDEALIST REJECTED 203 

1. The first question is this : To what extent 
was Jeremiah defeated ? How far did his defeat 
go ? It is clear that it was a social defeat, a po- 
litical defeat, a contemporary defeat. His vision 
of God was true ; his vision of human life was 
deep ; this vision was embodied in a genuine 
character, and was presented to his time with 
extraordinary eloquence, with piercing insight, 
and passionate sincerity ; yet he found it dif- 
ficult to get the ear of his countrymen ; and when 
he got their attention, he could not govern the 
courses of their thoughts, he could not control 
their passions, he could not shape their charac- 
ter, he could not command the national destiny. 
He was a social, a political, a contemporary 
failure, and his attitude in failure is one of the 
finest things in the history of the world. 

The significance of this prophet for us is here. 
There is a place in every life where the history 
of Jeremiah is repeated. Here is a parent striv- 
ing to make over the wisdom of his career to his 
children ; he is trying to govern the thoughts, 
the feelings, the characters, the destinies of his 
boys and girls by his true vision embodied in a 
true character. Here the most successful parent 
that ever lived is sometimes conscious of defeat ; 
he is set back ; he comes often at the last to a 
sad sense of failure. 

Look at the great teacher whose object is to 



204 -REVELATION AND THE IDEAL 

sway the intellectual life, and through the intel- 
lectual life to conform the character of his pupils 
to his vision of life's best ideal. Again, the might- 
iest teacher finds that there are limits beyond 
which he cannot push his dominion. His sceptre 
is a limited sceptre, his dominion is a limited 
dominion ; there are powers and possibilities and 
courses of passion in his pupils that are beyond 
his control. 

Consider the reformer who is trying to put 
moral ideals into business ; he is held up on every 
hand. He tries to put conscience into politics ; 
he is driven back every day. Here is the philan- 
thropist working to redeem from misery his fel- 
low-men, and his power goes only a little way. 
Look at the missionary of the cross in foreign 
lands, with his programme as bright as the sun 
and his field the world ; — and how far is he able 
to make his vision go ? 

What is the outcome in most cases from tbis 
social, political, and human defeat in the lives of 
good people ? Parents come to feel that there is 
no use trying to control the minds of their chil- 
dren ; the children will not take their advice. 
Teachers are apt to lose their enthusiasm and 
come to deal with ideas as if ideas were not liv- 
ing and the very voice of God. Eeformers in 
business, reformers in politics, philanthropists, 
and even religious teachers break down and give 



THE IDEALIST REJECTED 205 

up the impossible task. What a procession they 
make, those discouraged and despairing parents 
who have abandoned their high endeavor ; those 
teachers who have become machines instead of 
souls ; those reformers who have abandoned re- 
form ; those preachers of the Gospel, at home 
and abroad, who no longer believe in the power 
of truth ! This is a part of the tragedy of the 
world. And here comes Jeremiah in the wide 
and barren misery of his defeat to bear witness 
against our cowardly surrender. There he stood 
in defeat, in suffering, in shame, in rejection, on 
to the violent end of his life, bearing a still more 
tremendous testimony to the truth which God 
had given him to proclaim. Do you remember 
what the poet Bums said to a young friend ? 

" For care and trouble set your thought, 
Ev'n when your end 's attained: 
And a' your views may come to nought, 
Where ev'ry nerve is strained." 

Every human being either has faced, or is 
facing, or will face just this condition. How are 
we to behave in the presence of this limitation, 
this partial defeat ? Shall we abandon our task, 
or stand firm ? How did Christ behave ? When 
the day went to wreck and He was swallowed up 
in darkness and blackness, did He abandon his 
cause ? More and more definite, more and more 
tremendous, more and more absolute became his 



206 REVELATION AND THE IDEAL 

testimony to the kingdom which the world re- 
jected. 

2. Our second question concerns the limitor 
tions to this defeat in the case of Jeremiah, the 
limitations to the defeat in our own highest en- 
deavor. In the case of this prophet these limita- 
tions were two ; one concerned the personal life 
of the man, and the other the value of that life 
for the future. The defeat did not touch his per- 
sonal character. There he stood with his vision 
running like the fire of God in his blood and in 
complete control of his being. That is something 
over which to give thanks. There is a victory 
that is great. He kept his faith ; here is another 
victory. He saw the welter of the world's evil 
life ; he saw that God was over all and blessed 
forever. The fearful vision of sin did not in any 
way overpower the glorious vision of the eternal 
God. That awful vision did not reach to the ex- 
perience of the man's soul as a religious being. 
He had his hours of subjection to the darkness 
of the world ; he had his hours of gloom, his 
hours of bitterness, his hours of tears and sor- 
row ; he had other hours, hours of triumphant 
fellowship with God. His career was like some 
wild night when the wind is blowing a gale, 
when the tempest is on the deep, and yet the 
light of the beautiful stars is in all the terrible 
storm. So the fortune of this man in tempest, in 



THE IDEALIST REJECTED 207 

gloom, carried in it light from beyond the stars ; 
his spiritual triumph was done into a character 
and done into a book that have become part of 
the moral possession of mankind. We can imag- 
ine, too, that even his death in violence was like 
a sunset at the end of a stormy and tumultuous 
day ; that when he had gone he left the world in 
beauty and in tears. 

From the personal point of view there was this 
divine limitation upon Jeremiah's defeat. May 
we not put a similar limitation upon our defeat ? 
Is it not a great thing for a man to keep his 
soul pure, even if he is unable to do all that he 
longs to do for the kingdom of love in the con- 
temporary world ? Is it not a great thing for a 
man to keep the truth sovereign over the courses 
of his own life? I think so. And no outward 
force can deny that sceptre of power to your 
hand or take it from you. We may keep our 
faith ; it is a great thing to keep a great faith ; 
that is, to have eyes for the great world, its 
mighty populations, their sordidness, their selfish- 
ness, their brutality, their wickedness, the woe, 
the tragedy of human history, and at the same 
time to be able to see God in all and above all. 
Whoever keeps faith with his highest ideals puts 
a vast limitation upon his defeat as a servant of 
the kingdom. May we not sometimes sing of our 
inward life as Whittier sang of his, and that in 



208 REVELATION AND THE IDEAL 

the face of the gloom, the discouragement, the 
weakness, and the failure in our work for God ? 

" Yet, O Lord, through all a sense 
Of thy tender providence 
Stays my failing heart on Thee, 
And confirms the feeble knee; 
And at times, my worn feet press 
Spaces of cool quietness, 
Lilied whiteness shone upon 
Not by light of moon or sun. 
Hours there be of inmost calm, 
Broken but by grateful psalm. 
When I love Thee more than fear Thee, 
And thy blessed Christ seems near me." 

The second limitation to this prophet's defeat 
is the historic one. Jeremiah owes much of his 
power in all these six-and-twenty centuries since 
he lived to the fact that he was a faithful man in 
contemporary defeat. His has been a hand upon 
the heart-strings of the reformer and the sufferer 
from that day to this ; the epic of his words and 
the greater epic of his life have, as I have said, 
passed into the saving power of the kingdom of 
love. It needs to be said again that the contem- 
porary defeat of the man, in his vast worth, in 
his stern and tender fidelity, has been the chief 
source of his power over all subsequent times. 

Why is it that our hearts are moved to such 
unwonted depth in the presence of the cross of 
Christ and the tragedy of his existence ? Because 
in the blackness and utterness of his defeat He 



THE IDEALIST REJECTED 209 

stood absolutely true to the highest thought 
and the highest sentiment and the highest God. 
Through the worth of the Lord the defeat of the 
Lord in his own time has reached the heart of 
mankind as nothing in all history has done ; the 
defeat of the all-worthy has called out the great 
symphonies from the human soul and turned the 
requiem for the repose of Christ's spirit into 
the march, the victorious march of almighty love. 
Is there nothing for you in this, O mother, 
O father, grieved that your words do not go 
deeper into the hearts of your boys and girls? 
Be thou faithful unto death, and when you are 
in your grave those words that hitherto have 
been unheeded will pass into the souls of your 
children as they never could while you lived. 
O teacher, almost broken-hearted and in despair 
over your want of power to do what you would 
for those committed to your care, go on in the 
light of stern and beautiful fidelity to your ideals, 
and long after these scholars have graduated 
from your responsibility and the clods of the 
valley are sweet about you, your testimony to 
the Eternal will be with them in might. Those of 
you who are trying to make business more just 
and merciful, who are working to make politics 
cleaner and more honorable, who are seeking 
to rescue men from sin and shame and horror, 
who are preaching the gospel of the blessed God 



210 REVELATION AND THE IDEAL 

at home and abroad, remember that the witness 
of a good man's life to the Eternal is glorified in 
his death; "and I, if I be lifted up from the 
earth, will draw all men unto me." Jesus here 
speaks for Himself ; He speaks at the same time 
for idealists in all time. 

When Lincoln spoke those shining words at 
Gettysburg, when he uttered that greatest of all 
his public utterances, his oracle, the burden of 
the Lord, the Second Inaugural, much as the 
whole loyal North listened and revered, what 
immeasurable increase of power those words 
received when they came sighing in all the winds 
that swept over his untimely grave. Be not weary 
in well doing, for in due season ye shall reap if 
ye faint not. 

There is a passage in Sir Walter Scott's 
*' Waverley " that I have not seen for five-and- 
thirty years, but which has remained with me to 
this day. Scott is speaking of the sunset over the 
bay, west of his hero's outlook. " The sun's 
broad disc was on a level with the ocean, and the 
clouds through which he had traveled the livelong 
day were assembled about him like misfortunes 
and disasters around a sinking empire and falling 
monarch." The ugly day seemed to crowd and 
crush the sun in the west. When the stin had 
gone, what was left? The world transfigured in 
his evening glow. I think of the world as trans- 



THE IDEALIST BEJECTED 211 

figured in the death of Jesus Christ ; every dead 
hero lends a new tint and a new fire to that uni- 
versal transfiguration. That deep and abiding 
transfiguration through death is one great assur- 
ance that the defeat of the idealist is merely a 
single defeat ; the campaign is on between the 
right and the wrong; the temporary losses of the 
right issue in new and vaster fighting power; 
and at last the idealist sends forth his truth to 
victory. 



XVI 
THE IDEALIST IN CAPTIVITY 

"Now it came to pass in the thirtieth year, in the fourth month, in the 
fifth day of the month, I was among the captives by the river Chebar, 
that the heavens were opened and I saw visions of God." 

Ezekiel i, 1. 

Here we have a picture of the chief misery and 
the central glory of human existence in this world. 
The misery is our servile lot and the mean things 
in it that we must do ; the glory lies in the signifi- 
cance that we may discover in our environment 
and in our poor, narrow, and often repulsive task. 
This prophet was a captive ; he was a captive 
among captives ; he had his dwelling by the river 
Chebar in Babylon ; he was an alien in an un- 
friendly land ; yet the heavens were opened over 
him and his fellow-captives. In the open heavens 
he beheld visions of God ; he put these visions 
into his own heart and into the hearts of his fel- 
low-captives, thus filling their lives with the pres- 
ence of ideal meanings, giving them fresh light 
upon their existence, new courage, new confidence, 
and vaster hope. In the strength of the open 
heavens and the visions of God he was able to 
annul the evil of his own existence and that in 
the lives of his fellow-countrymen. 



THE IDEALIST IN CAPTIVITY 213 

Our human world is a vast compound of op- 
posites. Look at the life of man. He is com- 
pounded of flesh and spirit, self-interest and love, 
fondness for pleasure and the solemn sense of 
duty ; the free mind and the servile body ; the 
passion for time and the hunger for the Eter- 
nal. The conflicting elements in his being are 
reflected as in a parable in the great contrasts of 
nature in whose presence he lives. Nature is 
never one thing and one thing only. It is com- 
pounded of day and night, glory and gloom ; the 
tide at the flood and the tide at the ebb ; the fer- 
tile land and the desert ; the firm-set continent and 
the wild sea beating in upon all its shores ; the 
great globe itself and the impalpable and terrible 
immensities through which it travels. In these con- 
trasts of nature we find, as I have said, a parable 
of the oppositesof which our existence iscomposed. 
Nowhere have we pure spirit, pure power, pure 
freedom, pure joy ; the spirit dwells in flesh ; the 
power is fenced in with frailty, the freedom is 
under limitation, the joy is sadly mixed with 
pain. We are prophets by the river Chebar, in an 
alien and unfriendly land. Our life is in captivity, 
and the whole call of the Gospel is for us to 
transfigure our captivity with great meanings, 
with high purposes ; to live in it under an open 
heaven and in the strength and solace of visions 
of God. 



214 REVELATION AND THE IDEAL 

1. In the first place let me say it is universally 
admitted that genius works in this manner. What 
is the reason for the increasing significance of 
the poet Burns for human beings in every land 
and clime ? What is the reason for his increasing 
hold upon the millions that are second to none in 
their importance to the vitality, the character, 
and the progress of the world ? Not in his irregu- 
lar life is to be found the reason; not in the 
frailties that stained his humanity ; not even in 
the pathos of his career, his brief career. The 
reason is to be found, first of all, in those three- 
and-twenty years in which he kept unstained the 
whiteness of his soul. The second source of the 
fascination lies not in the frailties, but in the 
glorious humanity that beat in him with a divine 
pulse. The third reason for his extending empire 
is in his insight into the captivities of this 
great world of ours. He saw the dignity of toil, 
the nobility of work, the possibility of honor, the 
reality of love, and with his insight and sym- 
pathy he brought to light the significance in the 
lives of the poor, the unfortunate, the oppressed, 
the lonely, and the sorrowing. There is the last 
and the finest source of power. He was able to 
represent not the whole but a large and fine sec- 
tion of the meaning of suffering and toiling 
human beings. 

Why is it that Bunyan has become a classic ? 



THE IDEALIST IN CAPTIVITY 215 

He was far from being the most learned man of 
his time. Profounder minds there were than his ; 
his theology has been outgrown ; the Christian 
Church has left it behind. That theology stands 
there in the seventeenth century simply as a mile- 
stone in the long journey of the evolution of the 
kingdom of God. And yet Bunyan fascinates the 
world to-day ; Bunyan is an English classic, and 
will remain a classic as long as the English lan- 
guage is spoken. What is the chief source of 
Bunyan's power? He regarded Bedford jail as 
only a section of the general captivity of his 
fellow-men, and in Bedford jail, in his own cap- 
tivity, he found freedom. He dreamed his dream 
of a world-bondage and a world-freedom, and 
beat his dream into the music of classic English 
speech and sent it forth to make men aware of 
their captivity and to give them at the same time 
the freedom that comes from the vision of the 
Christian God. 

What is the final and supreme source of the 
fascination which Milton wields over all heroic 
men and women ? It lies in what his character 
represents of insight and moral grandeur. Re- 
member that he abandoned poetry for civil serv- 
ice ; that for twenty years he stood at his task, 
an obscure but mighty public servant ; that he 
wore himself into blindness in that service ; that 
at the end of these twenty years he found that 



216 REVELATION AND THE IDEAL 

the commonwealth for which he had given his 
manhood was in wreck; that he himself was a 
social outcast, desolate with darkness and with 
danger compassed round ; with evil tongues war- 
ring against him every day. Then it was that 
Milton turned in his captivity to the inward life; 
he began once more to sing, in the gloom of the 
evening of his days, and he sang " Paradise Lost" 
and " Paradise Regained," and " Samson Ago- 
nistes " ; he took the constellation of his verse and 
set it in all its undying splendor in the deep mid- 
night of his evil time. And because that verse 
represents his insight and his character in cap- 
tivity he wields and will ever wield a royal influ- 
ence over all heroic souls who speak the English 
tongue. Are you completely aware that in John 
Milton, in his insight, in the freedom that he 
won in his captivity, in his prophetic character 
and triumph, you have one of the chief glories of 
our English race ? 

2. Let me remark, in the second place, that 
along this path have come all the greater things 
in our faith as Christian men. Our life of captiv- 
ity in time has been read by a great succession 
of sublime spirits ; they have found in it divine 
meanings ; these divine meanings discovered by 
them in their suffering and in their bondage have 
become the faith of our race and the gi'eatest 
faith in the world. Look for a moment into this 



THE IDEALIST IN CAPTIVITY 217 

fact. Who are the men who made our Christian 
theism, who laid the foundations of our belief in 
one God ruling the universe, moral in his being, 
whose spirit is a judicial process in the life of 
mankind, convicting men of their sins, punishing 
them as they go, and forever moving a redemp- 
tive tide in the world's life ? The great prophets 
of Israel, — Amos, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, 
Habakkuk, and the nameless but mighty prophet 
of the Exile. These men read the terrible life of 
their time : its injustice, its robbery, its corrup- 
tion, its inhumanity ; these men, who felt the cap- 
tivity of the world in which they lived, turned 
their eyes upon it and found it to be the bed over 
which moved in tides and billows the great sweet- 
ening, saving being of the Infinite God. 

What is the central glory of Christ's life? 
What was his lot ? He was born in Bethlehem, 
in a stable, laid in a manger because there was 
no room for Him in the inn. He grew to man- 
hood in little Nazareth, a viUage in the northern 
part of Palestine, in a despised province of the 
Roman Empire ; his outlook was confined to fields 
and flowers and birds on the wing and the hen 
and her brood in the village streets ; He spent 
his days in lowly duties, drawing water for his 
mother at the well since named after her, work- 
ing at the trade of a carpenter with Joseph ; his 
lot was lin^ited, forlorn ; He was unrecognized, 



218 REVELATION AND THE IDEAL 

uncomprehended for thirty years of his existence. 
The only great thing that He saw was the sun 
sweeping from east to west, the great sky as it 
unfolded its splendor to Him at night. When 
Pie came to his public ministry, He had not 
where to lay his head. The first Preacher of the 
Gospel was poor and homeless. His disciples were 
ignorant men who persistently misunderstood 
Him at every stage of his onward march ; his 
times were ignorant, his age was ignorant. Was 
there ever captivity profounder or more tragic? 
Death as a criminal came to close the drama of 
his career ! Yet through it all He shot the vision 
of life's worth because of God's presence with 
men. From that career down through the captiv- 
ity of the ages has come this same vision of life's 
majesty and glory. 

You admit all this ; you confess at once the 
achievements of genius in every sphere of life. 
Still you are unsatisfied, and ask what are men 
and women without genius, without extraordinary 
character and opportunity, to do ? We are all 
caught, and we know that we are, in the limita- 
tion and grinding captivity of mortal life. Where 
is the path that will lead such as we are to in- 
sight, freedom, and triumph? 

3. Let me say, in the third place, that the way 
is plain for our feet, for the feet of every one. 
We must learn to think. God gave us minds. 



THE IDEALIST IN CAPTIVITY 219 

We are rational beings. One function of thought 
is to lift a man out of the limited sphere in which 
he lives into the clear upper air. The eagle can 
outsoar the gun of the sportsman ; when the sea- 
fowl gets tired of the boiling deep, it can take 
to the freedom of the skies. " Hitch your wagon 
to a star," said Emerson, the star that looms 
through the mists of the evening like an untended 
watchfire on the hillside ; it will carry you to the 
zenith. 

What is the meaning of all this ? Take the 
supreme minds in history ; what are they for ? 
You can read ; can you not make the acquaint- 
ance of some sublime spirit, know its thought 
through and through, join that mind in a great 
companionship, greaten your own vision and gain 
for a moment at least your freedom in the ascen- 
sion of your soul under such safe conduct ? This 
is one of the glories of our time, that men who 
can read, who wish to employ a part of their 
leisure seriously, may be admitted into fellowship 
with some spirit who has found his freedom in 
exalted thought and who views life, not from the 
pit in which the particular duty is set, but from 
the mountain-top to which the spirit may rise. I 
urge the younger people who hear me to cleave to 
the friendship of such minds ; they will become to 
you wings in many an hour of sordid and burdened 
being and carry you into vision and freedom. 



220 BEV ELATION AND THE IDEAL 

The second function of thought is to look down 
to the riches beneath. Remember that the Indian 
had the same America that the white man has ; 
the coal mine was under his feet, the iron, the 
silver and gold; he trod over the oil well and 
never dreamed of the wealth under his feet. In 
its constitution you have the same life that Isaiah 
had, that Ezekiel had, that Paul had, that the 
man of genius anywhere has. Your life may look 
like a Kimberley, barren, repulsive on the out- 
side : remember that it may be a Kimberley be- 
neath, with a vast diamond deposit at its heart. 
Think, probe, reflect ; do not say that life is poor 
till you have gone to the heart of it and seen 
what is hidden there by God's hand as the prize 
of your living. 

The next step onward is to learn to love. The 
being who does not love must be hopeless ; in such 
a life there is no motive to live. There is no ade- 
quate reward in living for the loveless heart ; add 
love to life and then see how radiant it becomes. 
Take, for example, a mother with a half-dozen 
children about her. Take away her love, and 
then try to think of a greater bondage. Those 
six children beseeching her from morning to 
night for help, calling upon her to wait upon 
their wants, to care for them, turn existence into 
slavery from dawn to nightfall. Take from the 
mother her dower of love, and you leave her a lot 



THE IDEALIST IN CAPTIVITY 221 

of unmitigated captivity. Charge her nature with 
love, and her lot becomes a part of heaven ; to 
wait, to watch, to serve, to protect, to teach, in- 
spire, and fill those lives with meaning and hope 
makes the mother's life a singing life. The key 
to the meaning and the mai'vel of her lot is in 
her love. 

Have we no causes ? Is there nothing that we 
care for? We pity the martyrs and the confess- 
ors, the apostles who one and all went down to 
death. We read the history of our own Civil War 
and we pity the gallant regiments that went 
through fire and smoke out beyond to meet God. 
Let us weep not for them, but for ourselves if 
we have found nothing in this world to live for, 
and die for, if need be. The great glory possible 
in our captivity is to love the right things and 
stand by them in the sense of privilege and joy. 

There is still another step to be taken in the 
way toward freedom. The mere thinker is apt to 
become a dreamer and a pessimist ; his thoughts 
are golden, but the world under them does not 
change ; it abides as stubborn, ugly clay ; and 
thus he is tempted to think that all his thoughts 
are vain. Do you not know many such 
souls? They speak of their ideals and at the 
same time look out with eyes of inexpressible 
sorrow upon the world that becomes no better 
under the light of their thought. As the mere 



222 REVELATION AND THE IDEAL 

thinker is inadequate, so is the mere lover ; he 
becomes the sentimentalist. This crisis forces 
upon us the question, What is it that gives real- 
ity to thought, that takes it out of the category 
of fiction? What is it that gives splendor to 
emotion and that denudes it of the shame of 
mere sentiment? It is the honorable, the con- 
scientious deed that embodies as a creative force 
the thought and the love, that puts a new face 
on this poor world, that changes our captivity 
step by step into freedom, that creates a new 
fellowship between souls while the limitation 
lasts ; that generates character, that brings us 
into league with God, whose reality is attested 
in his ceaseless improvement of his works ; that 
sets us in covenant with the great divine Christ, 
whose chief word is this, " My Father worketh 
hitherto, and I work." If we employ our mind 
aright, we shall gain a vision from God ; if we 
employ our human heart aright, we shall love 
the vision with a passionate love ; and if we are 
honest men, we shall be able to put the vision 
and the love into our work and as creative 
forces in the service of the kingdom of the ideal, 
the kingdom of God, we shall win our freedom 
in our captivity. 

The river Chebar is with you and with me. It 
is in your home ; it is in your business ; it is in 
your nation. Its channel is ever near us as it 



THE IDEALIST IN CAPTIVITY 223 

flows through the life of our time. The bondage 
is here ; we all know that. Is that all ? Sorrow, 
limitation, frailty, meanness, death, — are these 
the whole story ? Surely not. It was never meant 
that we should take our captivity apart from the 
open heaven and the vision of God. Take vision 
and captivity together; what God hath joined to- 
gether, let no man put asunder. A dewdrop with- 
out the sun is nothing but a duU, heavy, sorrow- 
ful tear ; a dewdrop with the sun in it is a jewel 
and a joy. Your life and mine apart from God are 
unendurable. I do not wonder that so many men 
commit suicide ; if godless men were not so often 
cowards, they would thus seek relief in vaster 
numbers. The godless life is the hopeless life, 
the round as of a treadmill ; the heart turns to 
dust as it toils like an eyeless Samson at its 
servile task. Remember that Chebar is not 
the only river; there is a river the streams 
whereof shall make glad the city of God. There 
is a captivity in which the song is heard, " God 
is in the midst of her ; she shaU not be moved ; 
God shall help her and that right early." 



xvn 

THE IDEAL IN YOUTH AND AGE 

" Your old men shall dream dreams, your young men shall see visions." 

Joel n, 28. 

It would seem that vision is the original form 
of mind and the ultimate form. Before you can 
judge or conclude about anything, you must first 
see it. Here are two eagles, two race-horses, two 
athletes ; before you can judge, compare, and 
conclude about them, you must first see them. 
Here are two poems, two essays, two speeches ; 
before you can say anything true about them, 
you must see into the heart of their meaning. 
The aboriginal form of intellect, the sunrise of 
intelligence, is vision. So, too, the ultimate form 
would seem to be vision. When you have taken 
to pieces in your thought a picture, a poem, a 
symphony, a statue, a beautiful temple, any work 
of art, and studied each part in detail, you do 
not leave it there ; you put the work of art to- 
gether again ; and as your first contact with it 
was a vision of the whole, your last contact with 
it, greatly enriched, indeed, by the preceding 
analysis, is a vision of the whole. 

Sir Isaac Newton beholds the falling apple ; 
instantly there comes into his mind the vision of 



THE IDEAL IN YOUTH AND AGE 225 

the stellar universe in balance through the two 
great laws of attraction and repulsion. Then fol- 
low years of laborious thought, intense analytic 
toil ; after this comes Newton's final attitude 
toward the physical universe; his first vision 
stands attested and enriched in his last. The 
same fact appears in the minds of the great phi- 
losophers of the race. Look at a thinker like 
Spinoza, Kant, Berkeley; in each case there 
came to the philosopher the vision of the mean- 
ing of his world ; it came as a whole ; it came 
as a rare insight and as a flash. Then followed 
the years of toil, the elaboration in detail, the 
verification in the analytic process; and after 
this the resurgence of the original vision larger 
and richer and more authentic. 

The same thing is true in religion ; our first 
contact with God is vision ; then, if we are cap- 
able of it, the world of learning, the world of 
reflection, and the world of experimentation fol- 
lows ; still we look forward in this life and in 
the future life to the restored and mightier vision 
of God. Thus it would seem that vision is the 
first and the last form of human intelligence. 

What is the meaning of vision ? Is it a mere 
fancy ? No. It means insight into the heart of 
some great aspect of human life. Napoleon is 
confronted by Austerlitz, dark as Erebus the first 
day ; then he sees his opportunity. Alexander 



226 REVELATION AND THE IDEAL 

Hamilton was made Secretary of the Treasury 
in the administration of Washington ; the finances 
of the country were dead ; Hamilton saw his op- 
portunity ; " he touched the dead corpse of the 
public credit and it sprang upon its feet." Plato 
looks into the soul of his master, sees the mean- 
ing of his master's life, and embodies his version 
in the " Apology " and " Phaedo." The Apostle 
John broods the life of Jesus tiU the vision em- 
bodied in the Fourth Gospel takes possession of 
him. Lincoln sees slavery and its woe and re- 
solves, if ever he is able, to smite that iniquity 
hard. The lost son, in our Lord's parable, looks 
about him on swine, husks, the far country, ruin ; 
he comes to himself, sees into the meaning of the 
mournful condition in which he finds himself, and 
says, " I will arise and go to my father." Vision 
is insight into the meaning of life ; the greater 
the vision the greater the apprehension of the 
significance of human living ; the divine vision 
of Jesus is the divine insight into the meaning 
and glory of our human existence. 

Visions are of two kinds, as you perceive by 
the text. There is the vision that issues from 
experience ; the testimony of the courses of life 
is here gathered up into a great, sure intuition. 
There is the vision that anticipates life, the in- 
sight that is the prophet of the high possibilities 
of existence ; one is the dream of age, the other 



THE IDEAL IN YOUTH AND AGE 227 

is the vision of youth. There is the dream that 
comes out of the total life that men have lived, 
like the star that rises astern of the ship on 
which you are sailing. There is the vision that 
antedates experience, like the star that looms on 
the far horizon whither you are sailing. Let me 
say a word upon each of these two visions, the 
vision that comes out of experience, the vision 
that anticipates and is the prophet of experi- 
ence. 

1. First, then, the vision that sums up the tes- 
timony of the life that has been lived, the work 
that has been done, the suffering that has been 
endured. It is mighty, it is inevitable as the voice 
of God. There is John Stuart Mill, one of the 
most interesting of the eminent men of the nine- 
teenth century. He began with no faith, with no 
religion, with no sympathy with any man's reli- 
gion, because his atheistic father had crushed his 
nature into that neutral form. How did he end? 
With more than pale theism, with the conviction 
that the reality of God was a high and serious 
probability, with the mood of utmost reverence 
toward Jesus Christ, with the feeling that future 
existence is open to hope, and that if it is good 
for us to live again after death that boon will 
probably be granted. Here is the solemn vision 
issuing from the wide, various, noble experience 
of that extraordinary man. Consider Browning, 



228 REVELATION AND THE IDEAL 

dying in Florence at the age of seventy-seven, 
and London on fire reading his last book fresh 
from the press. What was Browning's report of 
himself as he went his way into the unseen? 

" One who never turned his back but marched breast for- 
ward, 
Never doubted clouds would break, 
Never dreamed, though right were worsted, wrong would 

triumph. 
Held we fall to rise, are baffled to fight better, 
Sleep to wake. 

** No, at noonday in the bustle of man's work-time 

Greet the unseen with a cheer! 
Bid him forward, breast and back as either should be, 
* Strive and thrive ! ' cry, ' Speed, — fight on, fare ever 
There as here! '" 

You have seen the sun, harassed by clouds all 
through the afternoon, swing beyond them and 
transfigure the whole west, and, as it seemed, 
pause for a moment and take a last look of splen- 
did triumph at the world before descending ; so 
Browning's great dream came. Do you see what 
I mean by the dream of age? It is experience, 
gathering itself up into a great faith and deliver- 
ing its might to the world. 

2. Turn now to the vision of youth, the insight 
that precedes life, that is the herald and prophet 
of life's possibilities. We see at once how sig- 
nificant this vision must be. Before the Parthenon 
can be built, there is the vision in the artist's 



THE IDEAL IN YOUTH AND AGE 229 

brain ; before the " Divine Comedy " or " Lear " 
or " Macbeth " or " Hamlet " can come into ex- 
istence, there must be a vision in the mind of the 
poet. So in all work of reform. The Protestant 
Reformation came out of Luther's vision of the 
freedom of the Christian man in God. Thus it 
is in the political life of the world. The American 
Revolution came out of a vision — the vision of 
independent nationality. 

This leads us to clearness when we turn to life. 
There is Jesus and his temptation. What kept 
Him pure in that temptation, in that conflict of 
the higher and lower within Him? His vision 
of the divine meaning of his life ; He was the 
Son of God. What kept Paul clean and pure 
and growing, exposed as he was to all the iniqui- 
ties of the Roman Empire through which he 
traveled ? The heavenly vision, to which he was 
not disobedient. And many a youth, descending 
into many a dark place, is saved because he car- 
ries in his mind the vision embodied in these 
words, " When sinners entice thee, consent thou 
not." The glory of youth lies in the vision that 
anticipates life. Look at it in the highly intel- 
lectual youth of this country ; they survey the 
whole field of mind ; they see what has been done, 
what remains to be done. Instantly there rises 
up before them a world of vision to be done into 
life, education, science, politics, society ; this 



230 BEV ELATION AND THE IDEAL 

vision concerns the whole intellectual condition 
of their age. 

There are the young men with moral vision, 
who see what each man ought to become and to 
do ; what collective society should become and do. 
Here is the sunrise in the vision of youth out of 
which the whole splendid moral day is to come. 
A young man without vision is incomplete ; if 
he has no glowing picture in his imagination of 
what he personally should be, of what he would 
like to see his fellow-citizens become ; if his mind 
is not illumined with burning forms into which he 
longs to see society rise, he is not normal ; there has 
been no sunrise in his soul, there is as yet in him 
no promise of a great intellectual and moral day. 

3. Look, in the third place, at the way in 
which these two visions work together, the dream 
of the old man and the vision of the young. You 
recall Bacon's maxim, " Young men for action, 
old men for counsel." In Aristotle you find the 
same sentiment ; power inheres in the younger, 
wisdom in the older generation. In Homer you 
find the same thing, in the two personalities of 
Achilles and Odysseus. Odysseus said to the in- 
vincible Achilles, " You are far mightier than I 
with the spear, but I am greater than you in 
knowledge." Consider the very structure of our 
life in parenthood and childhood ; look at the 
schools, the colleges, and the universities of the 



THE IDEAL IN YOUTH AND AGE 231 

world ; in each case the younger generation and 
the older are in vital fellowship ; each is gainer 
through the help of the other. The same thing 
is true of business. Wherever business is success- 
ful, wherever it is well organized, it includes the 
younger and the older. In the professions of med- 
icine, letters, law, the combination of the two 
appears ; there is the young man with his vision, 
there is the old man with his dream. 

The worst thing that can happen to youth in 
the fire of its ideal is to be met by the cynicism 
of age. How often that happens ! Cynical, un- 
believing, serpentine, gloomy old men appear in 
every generation and try to darken the sunrise 
in the soul of youth. There is another side to the 
calamity ; there is dissolute and mocking youth 
in the presence of the dream of a great manhood 
or a great womanhood in the last of life. What 
is the best thing to which we may attain ? The 
vision of youth, imparting color and glow, renew- 
ing the faded splendor in the dream of old age, 
the dream of old age authenticating the vision 
of youth, as if the sunrise and sunset each looked 
at the other ; the prophecy and the fulfillment 
of the day, the anticipation and the achievement 
of the soul. 

Youth is under great obligations to age ; it 
should therefore fire with its own peculiar ideal- 
ism the spent vitality of those who have borne 



232 REVELATION AND THE IDEAL 

the heat and burden of the day. How the old 
are cheered, how happy they become when they 
see the young generation a generation of prophets ; 
when they see young men not sensualists, not 
bent on drinking to the dregs the cup of selfish 
and sordid pleasure, but a great battalion of sons 
of the morning ! 

Age is under great obligations to youth. Let 
age turn to the young men, not with the empti- 
ness of a blackguard existence, not with a career 
that has nothing to say but that life comes only 
to dust and ashes at last ; let age turn to youth 
and say, " I have found God, I have found duty, 
I have found work, I have found my soul, and 
all the visions of my early years have been au- 
thenticated, enriched, glorified in the issues of 
my human experience in God's world and under 
God's guidance." You recall that beautiful record 
in the Old Testament, the record of the friend- 
ship of the two prophets, Elijah and Elisha? 
The great old prophet, his life lived, his work 
done, touches the young prophet whose career is 
all before him. Out of the chariot of fire, out of 
his ascending life, Elijah gives back as the issue 
of his existence the dream that had transfigured 
Palestine. Instantly the young prophet answers, 
" My father ! my father ! The chariot of Israel 
and the horsemen thereof!" He took Elijah's 
dream to enrich and attest his own vision. 



THE IDEAL IN YOUTH AND AGE 233 

Why is it that the world so loves Tennyson's 
lyric, " Crossing the Bar " ? If it had been writ- 
ten when he was a man of twenty or thirty it 
could not have meant what it means to us. We 
read " In Memoriam" : that is the vision of the 
young poet as he looks upon the black face of 
death. He is eighty-three years old, and the dream 
of his age authenticates the vision of his youth. 
The trembling, tentative faith of early manhood 
has become a great, sure, splendid conviction. 
That is the inmost significance of the incompa- 
rable lyric ; the light upon the young face has be- 
come the fire in the old heart : — 

" Sunset and evening star, 

And one clear call for me ! 
And may there be no moaning of the bar, 
When I put out to sea, 

" But such a tide as moving seems asleep, 
Too full for sound and foam, 
When that which drew from out the boundless deep 
Turns again home. 

" Twilight and evening bell, 
And after that the dark ! 
And may there be no sadness of farewell, 
When I embark; 

" For tho' from out our bourne of Time and Place 
The flood may bear me far, 
I hope to see my Pilot face to face 
When I have crost the bar." 



XVIII 
THE IDEAL IN HISTORY 

" And thou shalt hear a word from behind thee^ saymg) This is the way, 
walk ye in it.** 

Is. zxx, 21. 

We live in a speaking universe, in a many-voiced 
world. There is the great voice from within. 
Now it is a call from the depths and again it is 
an answer from the heights. In this inward voice 
there are the clear mountain notes and the muf- 
fled valley sounds. There is the trumpet of con- 
science as from Mount Sinai, the high note of 
privilege as from the Mount of Transfiguration, 
of wisdom as from the Mount of Beatitudes, of 
love as from Calvary, of inspired anticipation as 
of the ascension song from Olivet ; and there 
is the horror of defeat as from Ajalon, the cry 
of sorrow as from the valley of weeping, the 
sound of the struggle between doubt and faith 
as from the valley of the shadow of death, the 
wail of despair as from the abysses of Gehenna. 
All these mountain notes and aU these notes 
from the valley go to swell the power of the 
vast voice from within. It is a voice whose com- 
pass extends from the " De Profundis " to the 



THE IDEAL IN HISTOBT 235 

" Gloria in Excelsis," from the lowest note of 
despair to the sublimest cry of jo3\ 

There is the voice from beyond the soul, and 
from above. This is the voice that Jesus heard 
at his baptism and which said, " This is my be- 
loved Son in whom I am well pleased." It was 
the voice of the Infinite delight in the Divine 
youth. The voice from above spoke to the dis- 
ciples in the words, " Go ye into all the world 
and make disciples of all the nations." It was 
the voice of absolute authority. The same voice 
came to Paul in his commission, " Behold I send 
thee forth far hence to the nations." In the mo- 
ments when our nature is clear and high, the 
voice from above still is heard as the voice of 
joy ; when we stand in the crises of life, it re- 
news itself as the voice of authority ; when we 
wait to have our work defined, the task set be- 
fore us, it falls upon us in its ancient simplicity 
and power. That voice from above ! Think of 
its richness and range. Joy, authority, benignity, 
loving kindness, and tender mercy are its notes. 
It is the pure melody of heaven, the sweet and 
awful music of the Infinite Love played down 
into human life. 

There is the voice from before us, the appeal 
of the future. Jesus heard this voice when for 
the joy that was set before Him He endured the 
cross and despised the shame ; it was the voice 



236 REVELATION AND THE IDEAL 

of the sublimest heroism. Moses heard it from 
the pillar of fire that went before him and his 
people by night; it was the voice of a splendid 
hope. The Hebrew race heard it in their Mes- 
sianic expectation; their faces were turned toward 
the future. From the beginning mankind has 
heard it, and thus the future has ever been the 
supreme allurement. Childhood catches its whis- 
per, youth is controlled by its great notes, man- 
hood listens to it in spite of unbelief, and old age 
hears in it the welcome of the better world. Hu- 
manity stands facing the coming time. This 
mood, this attitude is in response to the voice 
from before man. We fear as we enter the cloud 
because of the divineness there ; we follow our 
leader even when he is invisible as the sunflower 
faces toward the sun that is set ; and this inev- 
itable forward look is the human response to 
the divine call. 

There is the voice or word from behind. And 
this is the voice or word to which we are to listen 
to-day : the text is surely pertinent. " Thou shalt 
hear a word from behind thee, saying. This is 
the way, walk ye in it." 

1. The many-voiced world, the word from 
within and from without, give us first of all the 
eternal speaker. When we hear a word, we in- 
quire from whom it comes. When the notes of 
a great voice find us, we ask for the person 



THE IDEAL IN HISTORY 237 

whose voice it is. There is no speech without a 
speaker; words come only from persons; the 
final word comes from the final Person, the su- 
preme voice is the Voice of God. The word that 
we hear to-day from behind us, carries us, first of 
all, back of itself to the Divine Mind. 

Behind us, then, is the Infinite Wisdom ; the 
word of God carries us to the intelligence of 
God. Ten thousand mysteries surround our little 
lives ; but to the Divine Mind they are open se- 
crets. Only a few of the world's precious things 
can we remember ; but the Infinite Memory con- 
serves all. He has put the world's tears in his 
bottle ; precious in his sight is the whole process 
of history. The rain that the cistern cannot catch 
is not lost; it falls into the great conserving earth. 
What the race forgets, God remembers ; what 
falls beyond it, drops into his being ; what it 
leaves behind He carries forward. A friend visits 
a friend in the decline of life, and presents a 
picture to him of the long vanished boyhood or 
youth. The forgotten face is again strangely be- 
fore him. Good men forget the good that they 
have done ; the good work of the honest souls is 
soon forgotten. No memory is sufiicient for the 
precious things of the world, or even of a single 
life ; but God's remembrance never faileth. His 
heart is full of the faces that men have forgotten ; 
and some day these shining images of precious 



238 REVELATION AND THE IDEAL 

life will be presented to us, and we shall rejoice 
again in worlds that we had lost and even for- 
gotten. 

The voice of God fixes thought upon the hu- 
manity of God. This is one of the wonderful things 
lying in the idiom of faith. Look through the 
Old Testament ; look through the New ; observe 
how full the Bible is of this mode of speech. The 
voice of God to Adam, to Noah, to Abraham, 
to Moses, to Joshua, to Samuel, to Isaiah, to all 
the prophets, to all the psalmists, to all the apos- 
tles ; the whole Bible rings with the voice of God. 
What does this mean ? It means the implicit faith 
in the humanity of God. It means that the voice 
great with wisdom, broadened with precious mem- 
ories, and yet more, thrilling with the deepest and 
tenderest love, is the best sign of the appeal which 
God makes to man. 

We should miss an inexpressible comfort if 
we should fail to note the infinite tenderness that 
comes to us in this mode of speaking about God. 
When Saul hears the voice of David in the wil- 
derness, he can no longer cherish his awful pas- 
sion against him. " Is this thy voice, my son 
David? " he cried. And Saul lifted up his voice 
and wept. Recall the great voices that you have 
heard. Were they not great because of their ex- 
pressiveness in the service of honor, of tenderness, 
of sympathy, of love? Voices are great or small. 



THE IDEAL IN HISTORY 239 

rich or poor, full of music or torn with discord, 
according as they express or fail to express the 
humanity of man. It is the heart that makes the 
voice. The instrument may be the finest possible, 
but if there is not a large and true human heart 
behind it, that voice cannot be great, it cannot 
thrill and inspire. What would one not give to 
hear again the sound of the voices that are still, 
and that made the world of childhood a perpet- 
ual symphony. The voices of home are great 
because they are voices of love. The "Village 
Blacksmith" goes to church, he hears his daugh- 
ter singing in the village choir, and 

" It sounds to him like her mother's voice 
Singing in Paradise." 

The best voices of the living, the voices that are 
burdened with tenderness, make us think of the 
voices that pour forth the old strain of love in an- 
other sphere ; they make us think of the great 
voices of our race, and the humanity of man. 
When we hear the voice of God, we simply catch 
the notes of the Infinite Tenderness, we turn 
toward the utterance of the Eternal Humanity. 
Let us thank God to-day that He is a speaking 
God. Let us rejoice that the word from behind 
is the word of God, that the voice is the voice 
burdened witli the Ineffable Love. We begin with 
God ; all voices merge in the voice of God ; He 



240 BEVELATION AND THE IDEAL 

is within us and our experience rings with his 
call ; He is above us. The authority that over- 
whelms us by its gracious reasonableness and its 
everlasting righteousness is from Him. He was, 
He is, and He is to come. He has beset us be- 
hind and before, and He has laid his hand upon 
us. The directions from which the great voices of 
the world come, all run back into the eternal ut- 
terance. Yet as the breeze that travels over the 
cool expanse of the sea or the hot sand of the 
desert or the perfumed spaces of the land in 
each case takes character from that across which 
it comes, so the voice of God, coming now from 
the pure sphere above us, now from the hot 
world within us, and again over the vast and 
sweet-scented future, and yet again over the 
silent stretches of the past, carries in it distinct 
meaning and inspiration. To-day the word comes 
from behind ; it sweeps the entire breadth of a 
century. 

2. Why should we heed the voice of the past ? 
Because it is burdened with the wisdom of ex- 
perience. In the nineteenth century the human 
race has undergone an immense, perhaps an un- 
paralleled, experience. The conquest over nature 
is certainly without a parallel. All the sciences 
have been renewed and rendered immeasurably 
more significant. By means of travel and inter- 
communication the ends of the earth have been 



THE IDEAL IN HISTORY 241 

brought to our doors. The circumnavigation of 
the globe, which a few hundred years ago required 
a Magellan to accomplish, is now one of the 
commonplaces of travel. For production, distri- 
bution, transportation, human convenience, and 
comfort, nature has been pressed into a service 
hitherto unimagined. In the conquest of nature 
during the nineteenth century the race has trav- 
eled with something like the velocity of light. 
We look back to-day over a century of material 
progress as the light that strikes the spires of 
the churches this morning might look back to the 
unmeasured distances over which it has swept. 
That physical achievement is one vast experience. 
Another is the revolution that has taken place 
in our view of the length of human history. We 
have monuments of flourishing civilization reach- 
ing back eighty centuries. And from a host of 
facts and careful studies of facts, the belief has 
gained that human beings have been upon this 
planet from an exceedingly remote past. This has 
given a new sense of human history, and out of 
this new passion for the past, along all the great 
lines of intellectual interest, there have come about 
vast changes in belief. That experience has been 
followed by another. Criticism has been applied 
as never before to the world's highest faith. Never 
since Christianity entered the world has its truth 
been so questioned. The opportunity for doubt 



242 REVELATION AND THE IDEAL 

and denial, for question and attack, has been un- 
restricted. Men have been free to believe or not 
as they pleased ; they have been free to say the 
worst and to do the worst against all faith. They 
have been allowed to make out of the endeavor 
to destroy all religion a new religion. Nothing 
like this has ever before happened, at least on so 
wide a scale. In this century Christianity has 
followed Jesus into the wilderness. There like 
Him it has met the great adversary. As in his 
case, so in the case of the Gospel, the place has 
been a solitude ; during the conflict the angels 
have been invisible, and God Himself has seemed 
to hide his face. The great duel between doubt 
and faith has thus gone on, and the issue has 
rested with the stronger fighter. The ship that 
in other centuries kept close inshore, that when 
a storm arose made for port, in this century put 
out to sea, gave old Neptune a free hand, defied 
all his tempests, and rode in unconquerable maj- 
esty his fiercest waves, in the interest of a mission 
to humanity. 

Economic, social, political revolutions of untold 
moment there have been ; still these three are the 
main experiences of the race during the last hun- 
dred years. There is the material conquest, tell- 
ing us what nature was meant to do for man ; 
telling us what nature cannot do for him. There 
is the new sense of human history, and the new 



TEE IDEAL IN HISTORY 243 

consciousness of humanity to which it invites the 
individual person. There is the criticism of faith 
which in its freest and fiercest forms has issued 
in the profounder conviction of the indestructible 
reality of the religious instinct, and the supreme 
distinction of the Gospel of Christ. The voice from 
behind is the voice of a material conqueror, of a 
new humanity, of a faith surer of its truth because 
rooted in the nature of man. The voice of a cen- 
tury, of a century about to die, calls for yet 
greater conquest over nature, summons to a stiU 
profounder sense of the pathos and hope of hu- 
manity's vocation, appeals in tones that would 
seem to be irresistible in behalf of the Kingdom 
that cannot be shaken. 

The appeal, besides its power over reason and 
conscience, touches and fires the imagination. 
The two characteristics which mightily move the 
imagination are magnitude and life. Mere mag- 
nitude will not do, for it may be dead ; life alone 
will not suffice, because it may be petty. But when 
vastness and vitality are found together, and found 
in their supreme degree, there is the unrivaled ap- 
peal to the imagination. This appeal comes to us 
to-day. Take it in the single instance of the new 
sense of history. Our century falls away into all 
the centuries. Think of the millions of millions of 
human beings that have lived on this earth ; think 
of the vastness of historic humanity ; and when 



244 bevelatiOn and the ideal 

one reflects that every individual in this count- 
less multitude had a career of joy and suffering 
to run, to rise up out of the feebleness of infancy, 
and surrounded by grim environments to give 
battle for existence, to devise in hope, to struggle 
in expectation, press on through disappointment 
or fall under despair ; to link itself with other 
lives that inspire it with visions of greater good, 
to encounter new hostilities in the enmity of fam- 
ily against family, and tribe against tribe, to 
perish in the earliest of these collisions and die 
like the worm in the morning under the heel of 
the first heedless wayfarer, or to vanquish all 
social foes only to sink at last under the wheels 
of the order of the Universe, one feels that the 
vastness of humanity is the vastness of life, pa- 
thetic and tragic beyond expression, yet evermore 
overhung with rainbow lines and hopes. 

History is our pageant to-day. The front ranks 
are formed of the little children new to earth 
and sky ; behind them come the bright faces of 
youth, followed by those in middle life ; and the 
first section of the grand parade is closed by the 
weary feet and the patient countenances of age. 
A gap follows and the spectator now beholds the 
coming and going of civilizations and races. The 
New World of the West thunders by, the Britain 
from which it so largely came presses close be- 
hind, modern and mediaeval Europe bring up 



THE IDEAL IN HISTORY 245 

the rear. Carthage with her trades, Kome with 
her legions and legislatures, Greece with her 
hundred forms of genius and activity prolong 
the splendid line. Egypt, Assyria, Babylon, with 
the incomparable Hebrew race appearing at vari- 
ous points of the pageant, and giving immortal 
distinction to the entire procession, carry the 
vision to the limits of history. Eighty centuries 
have filed past and now the spectator looks afar 
off over the seemingly endless expanses of the 
prehistoric ages, and in windings that seem like 
the turnings and perplexities of all the rivers in 
one, in ever compacter and vaster masses, shad- 
owed by the clouds of dust that roll up from 
their incessant and multitudinous tread, in the 
awful silence of the dim distance, and in the in- 
finite pathos of their struggling and unappeased 
humanity, the procession sweeps ever backward 
and on into the unimaginable morning of time. 
This is the mighty, moving pageant of the race 
upon which we are called upon to look to-day; 
and over this unmeasured expanse we hear the 
word from behind. 

3. What does that word say? "This is the 
way, walk ye in it." There is a resting-place, 
a home for the human spirit. You may call it 
success, power, character, inward peace, recon- 
ciliation with the universe, rest in the Eternal 
Presence. There is a goal for the heart of man. 



246 REVELATION AND THE IDEAL 

a place of refuge, a region of content and joy. 
Wisely or ignorantly all but the incorrigible few 
are seeking that sphere of high content. This is 
the tragedy of life that men seek essential satis- 
faction in impossible places. Sin is not sought 
because it is sin, but because of the pleasure of 
it. No drunkard covets a wrecked manhood, no 
sensualist seeks the contempt of the world and 
the petrifaction of his heart, no digger for gold 
wishes to part with his humanity, no selfish per- 
son, no indiif erentist to .the common welfare tries 
to make himself odious to his fellow-men. Each 
sinner looks only at the pleasure set before him, 
each sinner is deluded into the belief that the 
path of selfishness is the path to the rich and 
happy life. These multitudinous pleasure-seekers 
present the same spectacle that a fleet of sail- 
boats would present headed down Niagara Eiver 
from the lake out of which the river flows. They 
sail on under the blue sky, over the great river, 
before the strong wind. They sail on to some 
haven of peace. The boats are brilliant with 
color ; they are alive with delight ; they are pas- 
sionate with high anticipation. They know noth- 
ing about the increasing current of the river, 
they know nothing of the terrible earnestness of 
its movement farther on, they are ignorant of the 
awful abyss that boils and thunders in the dis- 
tance. On they go seeking joy in the path of 



THE IDEAL IN HISTORY 247 

horror, and life in the region of death. That is 
the race as pleasure-seeker; that is our genera- 
tion on the excursion of selfishness ; that is your 
life and mine on the current of unsanctified de- 
sire. 

The word from behind is simply the experience 
of the race put to our service. Its warning is 
plain. Never yet did falsehood issue in profit, or 
treachery in inward peace, or selfishness in the 
sense of high achievement, or inhumanity in the 
consciousness of good. Never yet did the intem- 
perate, the immoral, the dishonest, the indifferent 
life rest in joy. Never yet did ingratitude to 
God and to man bless the soul. Never did the 
loveless heart prove other than its own curse. 
The spirit that harbors evil thoughts makes for 
itself a nest of vipers. All time proves that. The 
life that puts slight or hurt upon other lives, that 
breathes forth an atmosphere of disdain and 
scorn is like the volcanic mountain ; it blasts the 
life about it ; it has its recompense in the burn- 
ing and thundering pandemonium of its own 
heart. The pleasure that is sought in anything 
that means injury or contempt for another is 
suicidal. It finds itself, like the scorpion in the 
fable, girt by a ring of fire, and thereupon drives 
its fang into its own brain. Nothing is more im- 
pressive or grand than this judgment of history 
upon inhumanity. Turn and hear the word from 



248 REVELATION AND THE IDEAL 

behind ; you hear the voice of the mighty angel 
standing upon the land and upon the sea, com- 
manding the entire world, and declaring that the 
whole testimony of time is against the godless 
life. 

" This is the way, walk ye in it." The way is 
the way of justice and mercy and trust in the 
just and merciful God. The way is the way of 
great-hearted service, of thankful love, of patient 
kindness, of reverence in the presence of life, of 
chastity of soul, of unfailing sympathy, of en- 
during devotion, of everlasting hopefulness and 
faith. Jesus is the way. He went about doing 
good ; He said it is more blessed to give than to 
receive. He came not to be ministered unto, but 
to minister and to give his life for the world. 
He went to perfection by the path of suffer- 
ing ; He went home to God by the way of the 
cross. He is the way and the truth and the life. 
All history, all time, the whole majesty of the 
word from behind, attests the everlasting valid- 
ity of the saying that the way of the cross is the 
way of light. 



XIX 

THE IDEAL AS THE MEANING OF LIFE 

" And the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us (and we beheld his 
glory, glory as of the only begotten of the Father), full of grace and truth." 

John I, 14. 

We come to the greater meanings of life with 
pathetic slowness. After the sun has gone, we 
see for the first time thrown back upon the even- 
ing sky the glorious heart of the light that has 
been with us all the day. Is it not strange that 
only after sunset are we able to say how great 
and wonderful is the heart of light? Is it not 
pathetic that only after the unfailing and perfect 
lover has left the home are we able to see the 
infinite beauty of a mother's soul ? We cannot 
recall the day when we did not take pride in a 
father's strength. He was our hero ; he could do 
everything. As we recall our feeling toward him, 
we can readily sympathize with the poor bewil- 
dered Negro who was unable to distinguish be- 
tween the Almighty and Abraham Lincoln. 
Moses was to his people in the place of God. So 
is the great and noble father to his happy and 
admiring children. And yet we never knew what 
fatherhood meant till the great bereavement came, 
till we could think it over, see its struggle, note 



250 BEV ELATION AND THE IDEAL 

its silent suffering, dwell upon its heroism, and 
enter into its soul of tenderness and strength. 
We can best measure the great tree when it has 
fallen ; we can seldom take in the magnitude of 
noble fatherhood till we stand beside its grave. 
The same is true of friendship. Love our friends 
as we may, we are unable to do justice to them 
till death has purified our vision. David doubt- 
less thought that he knew his friend Jonathan ; 
but not till he learned that his friend lay dead 
on the battle-field of Gilboa did he awake to the 
glory of his soul. Then came the great lamenta- 
tion : — 

" Jonathan is slain upon thy high places, 
I am distressed for thee, my brother Jonathan: 
Very pleasant hast thou been to me; 
Thy love too was wonderful, 
Passing the love of women. 
How are the mighty fallen 
And the weapons of war perished." 

This is the truth about Jesus Christ. We do not 
find the adequate meaning of his life in the con- 
fession of devout Jews like Simeon, in the won- 
der of the shepherds, in the homage of the wise 
men from the East, or in the song of the angel 
which the faith of that time heard. These are 
beautiful dramatic incidents, but they do not 
go to the soul of our Lord. The disciples them- 
selves were slow of heart to believe. The walk 
to Emmaus is symbolic of the mind and mood 



THE IDEAL AS THE MEANING OF LIFE 261 

of all the disciples. They were children of sense 
and time ; they were overwhelmed by untoward 
events, scattered in the storm of death like sheep 
without a shepherd. They had walked with Jesus, 
they had heard Him speak, their hearts had 
burned under his message, and they had felt the 
greatness of fellowship with Him. Yet were they 
slow to gain genuine insight into the essential 
meaning of his career. Only after He had van- 
ished from their sight, and time, circumstance, 
opportunity, task, and crisis had forced the maj- 
esty of his teaching and character upon them 
did they awaken to the glory of God in the face 
of Jesus Christ. The first three Gosj)els have 
behind them a history of maturing judgment 
and deepening insight. They record one great 
achievement of the apostolic age, — the matur- 
ing, the greatening appreciation of Jesus. 

This is true of the Fourth Gospel. It was the 
last to be written. The Church has believed that 
it was written by the Apostle John ; we believe 
that it was written by him or by another of equal 
depth of being. He had lost his Master while 
he was yet a young man. Into his receptive and 
retentive nature had gone the message of Jesus, 
his wonderful ministry, and the image of his soid. 
This unwritten Gospel, this unexpressed life of 
Jesus in the mind and heart of John is his treas- 
ure. He has gone over it a thousand times. The 



252 REVELATION AND THE IDEAL 

words of his Master he finds unforgettable ; they 
have become an easy, an inevitable, an immortal 
memory. They are like a strain of music forever 
in the mind and forever exalting. His imagina- 
tion is a vast hall hung with scenes from the life 
of Jesus. The wedding at Cana of Galilee is 
there in colors intense and beautiful as life. Jesus 
speaking with the woman at the well, in search- 
ing dialogue with Nicodemus, witnessing to Him- 
self before the Jews, opening the eyes of the man 
born blind, presenting his vocation under the 
parable of the good shepherd, at the grave of 
Lazarus, uttering his great prayer for the world, 
pouring forth the divine comfort of his farewell 
discourse to his disciples are a few of the pictures 
in the imagination of John. The last supper is 
there; and how poor would seem even the won- 
derful work of Da Vinci could it be hung in the 
imagination of John and viewed in the light that 
falls from the original scene. In this spacious and 
splendid hall the beloved disciple lives. Among 
these pictures drawn by the hand of Jesus Him- 
self, colored out of the heart and conscience of 
Christ, and softened with the still, sad, expectant 
atmosphere of a needy humanity, this seer among 
the apostles spends his days. 

Words and pictures are not all. The Soul of 
his Master comes more and more into the vision 
of John. He thinks of the great beatitude: 



THE IDEAL AS THE MEANING OF LIFE 253 

" Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall 
see God." Part of that promise has been fulfilled 
in his experience ; with pure devotion, with great 
and enduring love he has waited upon the mani- 
festation of his Master's Soul, in word, in deed, 
and in suffering. And now there is dawning upon 
him, like some divine morning, the consciousness 
of the Soul of Jesus. He sees it, as the old leader 
saw God in the cleft of the rock, and the sense 
of its goodness becomes the psalm of his exist- 
ence. He longs for length of days, he prays for 
strength to record this vision of Jesus that has 
been born out of the heart of his discipleship. 
He selects certain scenes from the fullness of his 
Lord's life, he selects certain discourses, he se- 
lects a given line of events, and through these it 
is his purpose to pour upon the world the vision 
of Jesus which God has given to him. 

The great question that finally confronts John 
is this : What is the meaning of the life of Jesus ? 
He can find no explanation for it in time or in 
sense. It dates from God ; it witnesses for God ; 
it returns to God. It carries one backward to 
the Eternal as noon to morning ; it points for- 
ward to the Eternal as noon to evening. Jesus 
is unique in his life, in his mission, in his place 
in history. His is the ideal soul ; his is the ideal 
career. What does it all mean ? It means that 
in Him the Word was made flesh; it means 






254 



REVELATION AND THE IDEAL 



that his origin is in God, that his peculiar excel- 
lence is through union with God, that his grace 
and truth are the expressions of God. 

The incarnation is the meaning of the life of 
Jesus. It stands clear of all miracle. It is the 
truth to which this apostle is led by reflection ; 
it is the only conclusion to which he can come in 
view of the facts, the transcendent facts of his 
Master's career. There is no theory about Jesus 
that will do except that which finds, in his ad- 
vent, the advent of the Soul of God. There is 
no philosophy of the career of Jesus that can 
account for the facts, or that can satisfy those 
who see the Soul of Jesus, but that which dis- 
covers his origin, his history, and his home in 
God. Like an inverted rainbow was the Soul of 
the Lord, coming down out of heaven, returning 
into heaven, and revealing in its whole sacred 
curve the beauty of the Eternal Light, the glory 
of the Infinite Father. 

This is, however, only the great primary 
truth of the Gospel. In putting this divine in- 
terpretation upon the life of Jesus, John puts 
in a secondary sense, indeed, and yet in a true 
sense, the same interpretation upon the life of 
man. He says of John the Baptist: There was 
a man sent from God whose name was John. 
He, too, came from God ; he, too, had his task 
assigned him by the Highest. He came to bear 



THE IDEAL AS THE MEANING OF LIFE 255 

witness to the light that enlighteneth every man. 
Still there is a unique distinction in the life of 
Jesus. His distinction lies in the fact that He 
alone is able to show the world adequately, au- 
thoritatively, finally, where man begins, what he 
•carries in him, and where he ends. The east and 
the west are marked by the planets. They all 
rise in the east, they all set in the west. They 
describe the path of the sun, they come where 
it comes, they go where it goes. Still the sun is 
the great revealer of the order of the solar 
movement ; the sun is the great herald of the 
path that the planets take. We read the course 
of the planets in the light of the fiery course of 
the sun. East and west, as the beginning and 
the end of the planets, take on immeasurable 
meaning, because in them the outgoings of the 
morning and the evening rejoice. In the presence 
of the supreme Soul of Jesus we discover the 
origin and the end of our own souls. In the 
wake of the fiery circuit of his life we find 
the pale circuit of our own lives. What is called 
the incarnation is, first the meaning, the phil- 
osophy of the life of Jesus ; then it is the mean- 
ing, the philosophy of the life of mankind. 

1. In the light of the childhood of Jesus we 
read the childhood of the race. It is impossible 
to reduce the life of the Child tJesus to the mere 
influence of inheritance and environment. There 



256 REVELATION AND THE IDEAL 

is nothing in his human ancestry great enough 
to account for Him ; there is nothing in his sur- 
roundings in Nazareth, even when his mother 
and his mother's Bible are added to them to ex- 
plain the intelligence and character of this young 
life. We must go to God for the explanation. 
Those intuitions that fill his spirit with light, those 
dreams in which He lives that are brighter than 
the day, those feelings of supernatural beauty and 
tenderness which are the surprise of the world did 
not originate under the sun ; that subKme capacity 
by which this young Soul seeks to be about his 
Father's business dates from the Eternal. God 
wrought for Him and wondrously through his 
human ancestry, and through that environment, 
with its fields of beauty, its birds and its flowers, 
its hills and seas; with its spiritual possessions, 
its history of power and of hope. None the less 
distinct and awful in beauty is the soul that is 
the pure gift of God, that shines through inher- 
itance and environment, that transcends them, 
that even in boyhood climbs into high communion 
with the Infinite. We greet the sun to-day as 
the successor and descendant of other days ; we 
greet the sun as shining through the atmosphere 
of the earth. Jesus comes as the Child of Mary, 
as the Son of Man ; he comes through the ten- 
derness, the pathos, and all the conditions of lim- 
itation and growth belonging to our humanity. 



THE IDEAL AS THE MEANING OF LIFE 257 

And yet the sun in its essential life is independ- 
ent of the conditions of our world ; and in the 
same way the Soul of Jesus is independent and 
transcendent. While He is truly the Son of Man, 
He is at the same time truly the Son of God. 

In this light we read the meaning of the un- 
iversal childhood. We refuse to reduce the life 
of any child of man to the mere play of inherit- 
ance and environment. There is something new, 
something original in the endowment of every 
child. Here are twenty children under the age 
of six months. They aU look alike to you ; but 
to the twenty mothers each child has a unique 
and infinite charm. That unique and infinite 
charm is the eye through which the soul of the 
child looks. It began to be in the mystery of 
generation, it comes to itself through inheritance 
and environment; still it is a soul working in 
human form, a spirit with the plan of its being 
hidden in itself, a creation of God, and in his 
image, of high capacities, a messenger from the 
Eternal. There are few normal human beings 
who can look upon the soul of a beautiful child 
without the feeling that it comes from God. The 
infinite pity for distress, the dear and generous 
love for everything that lives, and above all the 
sense of goodness and the perfect trust in it that 
work in the heart of a beautiful child open into 
the eternity behind It. Only God could have 



258 REVELATION AND THE IDEAL 

made such a being. It is significant that Emer- 
son could not doubt the divine meaning of life 
or its permanence when he stood by the grave of 
his beautiful boy : — 

" What is excellent as God lives is permanent. 
House and tenant go to ground, 
Lost in God, in Godhood found." 

2. We construe the meaning of youth in the 
presence of the divine youth of Jesus. There is 
nothing in history equal to that heaven of ideals 
with which Jesus returned from his temptation. 
The moral world of man was there, the moral 
universe was there, the conscience of God was 
there in the splendor of the midnight Syrian sky. 
In the strength of this new heaven and new earth 
in his own soul, Jesus went forth to bring to pass 
in the soul of mankind a new heaven and a new 
earth. The Gospel is the idealism of Jesus ; it is 
the sunrise of God in his humanity ; it is the 
flush, and later the pure white light of the Eter- 
nal upon his youth. There is endless signifi- 
cance in the fact that in the youth of Jesus his 
Gospel was born. His divine childhood had risen 
into the mightier witness of divine youth. 

Nothing is more precious to mankind than the 
visitation of God in, the ideals of youth. Normal 
youth, especially after temptation has been met 
and overcome, advances to the task of life under 
an order of ideals brighter than the Pleiades, 



THE IDEAL AS THE MEANING OF LIFE 259 

grander than Orion. The fires of honor, justice, 
truth, chivalry, love, burn up the morning sky 
of youth. The revolt at injustice and inhumanity 
is native to youth. The demand for reform is the 
universal demand of youth. The demand is made 
in the name of the vision, the dream, the ideal 
presence in the heart of youth. The great wave 
of idealization that comes with love is nothing 
but the fresh advent of God in the soul. Take 
Burns's songs to Highland Mary. How perfect in 
sentiment they are, how utterly pure in human- 
ity. How the lover of this most human poet de- 
lights to see him in the secure and awful power 
of his newly risen ideal. 

How shall we regard this idealism of youth? 
We cannot ask a deeper or a more decisive ques- 
tion than that. The whole moral victory or fail- 
ure of existence lies here. We may sin against 
our ideals and yet not surrender them. We may 
do despite to them and yet weep our way back 
into their honor and power. But there is one 
thing that we cannot do. We cannot live in con- 
tempt of the ideal and yet believe in God. We 
cannot blaspheme the divine vision of existence 
given in the ideal and yet believe in the Gospel 
of Christ. We cannot repudiate, laugh at, scorn 
our highest thoughts, our supreme imaginations, 
and yet hold to the philosophy of life given in 
the incarnation. The way of Jesus the divine 



260 REVELATION AND THE IDEAL 

youth is given in the ideals of youth. Disregard 
these ideals, pour contempt upon them, extinguish 
them, and you cut all possible connection between 
your existence and the existence of Jesus. Again 
you see his parable. He is in the heaven of his 
ideal vision and strength and you are in the hell 
of your destitution of the ideal and between you 
and Him is the gulf that you have fixed. 

Revere the morning in your manhood and 
womanhood; revere the tide of love that rises 
within you from the eternal deep; revere that 
awful shadow of Himself that God throws across 
your inward existence; revere the mysterious 
movement within you in which God works might- 
ily in passion and in conscience carrying them 
into imperious moods, and in which He employs 
the imagination to frame pictures and hang out 
symbols of the highest in your nature. Let no 
man despise thy youth. It is the key to heaven. 
It is the path into the best life of the world ; it 
is the way into the discipline of Christ; it is 
one of the greater tokens that life begins in 
God. 

3. We see Jesus under the heat and burden 
of the day. He does not grow weary in well-do- 
ing. The contradiction of the world, its imme- 
morial custom of sordidness and shame cannot 
shake his confidence in the meaning of his life 
or disturb his faith in the truth of his Gospel. 



I 



THE IDEAL AS THE MEANING OF LIFE 261 

In all the records of his career there exists not 
even the shadow of the fear that He may be mis- 
taken about Himself and his message. Here again 
is the advent of God within Him ; here again his 
existence is supermundane ; here again the Eter- 
nal God is his refuge. In his service his heart is 
forever open to his Father ; He is in the power 
of an unceasing and prevailing prayer. 

When we pass from youth to manhood and 
womanhood, we lose something, but we may gain 
more. The light-heartedness, the audacious cour- 
age, the endless energy, the world rolling in the 
sunrise of perpetual romance — these fade away. 
And peculiar burdens come. The sense of limita- 
tion comes. We wear again the chains of Paul. The 
contradiction in our own nature, the contradiction 
in the world, is against us. Again the wind is con- 
trary. The routine of life, its monotonousness, saps 
enthusiasm and teUs hard upon hope. Again we 
are in the apostolic ship with the storm bearing 
on us for many days. The world loses somewhat 
its interest in us. It does not expect so much 
from us as it once did ; and we miss the bracing 
power of this high expectation. The power of 
love, although unyielding, and indeed invincible, 
is still sorely taxed. Business reverses, failing 
strength, sinking spirits, increasing sorrows tell 
hard upon the soul of existence. And yet over 
against all this God waits upon manhood and 



262 REVELATION AND THE IDEAL 

womanhood under the heat and burden of the 
day to surprise them with grace and truth. 

The path here is the path of prayer. When 
you feel that something is going, make sure that 
something better is coming. Open your whole 
nature to God; cry mightily unto Him. Live in 
the mood of appeal to the Eternal Tenderness. 
Then the process of the suns will be but the 
mellowing of your humanity, the discipline of 
life will be but the wheel that brings into view 
the lustre of the soul. For this does come to the 
faithful spirit — the sense of a deepening human- 
ity, the consciousness of increasing sensibility to 
the greatness and the pathos of existence, a wider 
and more generous sympathy, a nobler happiness 
in the number and eminence of the servants of 
God, a keener eye for the advent of God in chil- 
dren and in youth, and a profounder joy in this 
apostolical succession in the grace and power of 
the Most High ; a surer willingness to serve and 
to wait, a less fugitive delight in opportunity 
without regard to recompense, a larger capacity 
to share in the ideal aims, enthusiasms, achieve- 
ments, loves, and hopes of the race, and a vaster 
peace in the thought that through the interven- 
tion of the Infinite Compassion we may have a 
humble place among the saints in glory ever- 
lasting. If we keep God with us through prayer 
the reverses of life cannot crush us. We shall 



THE IDEAL AS THE MEANING OF LIFE 263 

see God in the life of the race more clearly; we 
shall believe in the coming of the kingdom of 
God more firmly ; and when we can no more hold 
our shields between the souls and the causes that 
we love and the enemy, the Lord will be their 
shield, the Lord will cover their head in the day 
of battle. 

4. One thing Jesus did not face. He did not 
face old age. The love of life that grows with 
the years and the certainty of death make a strange 
experience. Youth dies easily, because it is chiv- 
alrous. Manhood dies harder, because it is so 
deeply involved with responsibility. Old age dies 
hardest of all, because it does not want to die. 
We waste no words over the divine ease with 
which Jesus at thirty-three gave his soul back to 
God. Could He have done it with the same ease 
had He met death in the love of life born of 
many happy years, and in the increasing infirmity 
of age? 

That question Jesus has answered through the 
beloved disciple. Length of days were granted 
him. It was his privilege to see the world rolling 
into the light of Christ's interpretation of its 
existence. It was his lot to be the last of that 
wondrous company to go. He lived long, lived 
in the love and veneration of the whole Church, 
lived in a service that was to himself an unspeak- 
able delight and that was to his age a supreme 



264 REVELATION AND THE IDEAL 

inspiration. He went about the world "with his 
divine regard" for men and followed by their 
love and honor. How did he die ? Fearing pain 
as every mortal must, and yet in utter peace. 
He was going to his Master, to lean harder upon 
his strength, to rest on his love with a deeper 
zest. John believed that he was going from the 
less to the greater, from the shadow to the real- 
ity, from the life under sore limitation to the life 
of a son in his Father's house ; and therefore ha 
grew in hope and in peace as the end drew 
near. 

We must construe the last of life as we do the 
•first of life. We must bring it all into the pres- 
ence of the one standard human existence. We 
cannot grow in peace with the years if to us eter- 
nity is a blank. If death means the surrender of 
all for nothing, we cannot think of it as other 
than the supreme horror. But if we believe in 
God, in the eternal world, in the Lord Jesus ; if 
we believe that the human soul comes from God, 
is here visited of God and supported by Him; if 
we believe that just men are made perfect in the 
service and fellowship beyond time, we shall 
think that the best is yet to be, that the great 
beatitude of existence is awaiting us behind the 
terrible shadow. Under the bust of Maurice in 
Westminster Abbey the words are inscribed: 
" There was a man sent from God whose name 



THE IDEAL AS THE MEANING OF LIFE 265 

was John." No other account could be given of 
that great soul ; no other account can be given of 
any soul. We live and move and have our being 
in God. The endowment of childhood, the ideals 
of youth, the character of manhood and woman- 
hood, and old age leaning on its staff are signif- 
icant of God. The mystery of birth, wonder, 
knowledge, love, power, death, is the mystery of 
God. You cannot take the glory out of the cloud 
that lies in the path of the retreating sun ; you 
cannot take God out of the substance of human 
existence. Our reasonable thoughts, our high in- 
terest, our pure sympathies, our enduring love, 
and our true service are but the expression of his 
life in our life. Whether we live or die, we live 
or die unto Him, we live or die in Him. 

We make too much of death. We do not 
dwell enough on the soul and its ongoing might. 
As one sails the beautiful Mediterranean round 
whose shores so much that is greatest in human 
history took place, whose winds and waves bear 
in them sacred and glorious memories, whose 
coast-lines and the mountain ranges behind them 
represent so many of the splendid years of our 
race, one shrinks from leaving it. Then, too, the 
sea itself contracts toward the west, the shores 
draw together, and there in the way of the on- 
going mariner are the straits so narrow, so ap- 
parently impassable, so like the end. As one 



266 REVELATION AND THE IDEAL 

advances, the illusion vanishes. The straits are 
narrow and yet they are wide enough for the 
mightiest ship ; the straits are narrow and full 
of gloom, but they are not the end. On past the 
great rock at the entrance, on through the six- 
and-thirty miles of contracted life, onward in 
solemn haste and high confidence your ship goes 
and out into a greater sea, the glow of light and 
lines of fire on the whole distant horizon are the 
call of love from afar and the tender welcome 
home. 

Such is our life on this sea of time. Its winds 
and waves and tides and shores are rich in the 
treasures of human love. Who does not love this 
sea set in the framework of the worthiest and 
happiest that man has done, that man may know ? 
Who does not rejoice in it at its widest and 
greatest? Who does not watch with pain the 
inevitable lessening? Who does not sometimes 
fear lest he may have left behind all greater 
things, sailed by creative might, and all the 
thrones of genius and goodness and power ? Who 
as the years come and go does not become con- 
scious of a shrinkage of being, and that there in 
his path is death narrow, wild, the abode of utter 
gloom ? Is it not the end, and in it shall we not 
lose forever this enchanting human world? Not 
so. In that narrow passage there is room enough 
for the greatest soul to go. Let it go in solemn 



.THE IDEAL AS THE MEANING OF LIFE 267 

confidence and serene hope. Beyond is the infi- 
nite, and out into that infinite the soul shall sail 
to see again the abiding values and splendors of 
the heart, to note on the tides that draw it on- 
ward the welcome of the eternal love and the 
gracious light that cannot fail. 



XX 

THE MORAL IDEAL IN CHRIST 

" We make it our aim, whether at home or absent, to be well-pleasing 
Tinto him." 

2 Cor. V, 9. 

" To endeavor so to live that Christ would ap- 
prove our life," is said by John Stuart MiU to 
be about the best that men can do. It would not 
be easy even for an unbeliever to find a better 
translation of the rule of virtue from the abstract 
into the concrete, continues Mill, than " to en- 
deavor so to live that Christ would approve our 
life." These words occur in Mill's famous remarks 
about Jesus, the Prophet of Nazareth. It is 
strangely impressive to find this noble, but es- 
sentially skeptical, British thinker in the nine- 
teenth century in complete agreement with the 
apostle to the nations in the first century. The 
British philosopher says that about the best we 
can do is to endeavor so to live that Christ would 
approve our life, and the apostle says we make 
it our aim to be found well-pleasing unto him. 
Two things here call for attention : the end and 
the aim of the Christian life. 

1. There is the end. All endeavor at the rea- 
sonable control of life implies an end. There are 



THE MOBAL IDEAL IN CHRIST 269 

some forms of life without conscious end that 
are nevertheless good. Some people pursue good- 
ness as naturally as a star shines, as a bird sings, 
as a flower blooms. There are people with music 
in their nature and it breaks out like mirth, like 
sunshine through the cloud. There are people so 
radiantly endowed that to them goodness is play, 
perpetual delight ; as Wordsworth says, — 

" Glad hearts, without reproach or blot, 
Who do thy will and know it not." 

Nevertheless even here there is an end ; not, in- 
deed, in the conscious will, but in the instincts. 
The lapwing that spends the severe winter months 
by the Nile, that, when spring comes, flies north- 
ward to the British Isles, may not fly in the con- 
scious light of a goal, but the goal is in every 
beat of its wings, in every pulse of its heart ; and 
so those spirits that are moving from one moral 
climate to another, from one moral condition to 
a higher, even if they do not move in the con- 
scious light of an end are yet guided by an end 
in the moral instincts of their being. 

The reasonable control of life ; — that is the 
greatest task to which a human being is called, 
and it implies an end. Every locomotive that 
leaves the city has a terminal in view ; every ship 
that clears our harbor has a port in sight ; all 
target practice, whether by land or sea, by army 



270 REVELATION AND TEE IDEAL 

or by navy, implies a target, and whoever en- 
deavors to control his existence in this world 
endeavors in the light of an end. 

Further, the end is a vast revisional power. 
The artist's end, the beauty that he beholds re- 
vises every piece of work that he does, it revises 
his nature as an artist ; the end which the scien- 
tist serves revises his work, it revises his method 
and his intelligence as a scientist ; the end pur- 
sued by the business man calls for revision, it 
calls for the elimination of poor plans, of mis- 
taken notions, of short-sightedness, it calls for 
perpetual revision. When we come to Christian 
character, the end here exalts the intellect, puri- 
fies and ennobles the heart, greatens in volume 
and in power the moral will. A people without 
ends would be a people without standards. What 
do you desire this country to become ? What do 
you think should be the result of a liberal edu- 
cation ? What is your conception of mature hu- 
man beings ? What do you mean by citizenship ? 
What pleasures should be avoided, what pursued? 
What are the legitimate sources of enjoyment 
and the illegitimate ? We cannot answer these 
questions unless we have ends, because all our 
convictions come out of ends. There are no stan- 
dards when we have no ultimate governing ends ; 
we are blind to the great interests of our people 
unless we can read their meaning in the light of 



THE MORAL IDEAL IN CHRIST 271 

great ends. Anything will go as art, anything 
wiU go as good citizenship, as good business, as 
good thinking, as good religion, as good science 
if we are unable to bring it into the presence of 
an end and search it and examine it there. A 
nation without ends is a dismal mob of half-sav- 
age human beings ; a civilized people is a people 
with great ends in the light of which they judge 
their character and their achievement, in the 
light of which they are full of vigor and hope. 

The Christian end is not an abstract end ; it 
is personal. The end is not properly described 
as truth ; it is truth in life, truth in a personal 
soul. The end is not goodness, but goodness in a 
rational being ; not beauty, but the harmony of 
the world singing itself in a conscious, living, 
loving human spirit. The personality of the end 
or ideal means an immense gain. Look at a 
mother, a high-minded, broad-minded, noble- 
souled mother ; think of her among her children 
and the moralization which they receive from her 
unconsciously. In the first place she is to them 
moral illumination ; then the path of virtue is a 
path of delight ; the whole influence of the end 
through her is to engage and to fill the soul with 
a sense of the beauty of the world, the beauty of 
the world as the beauty of the Lord our God. 
Take a great teacher and his influence ; take, for 
example, Luther ; look at his fun, his power to 



272 BEVELATION AND THE IDEAL 

sing, listen to him as he plays his violin, join in 
his great-hearted frolic ; hear him render a great 
song ; put yourself under the immense range and 
vitality of his interests ; you are captivated by 
the man. Listen now to the prophet of God 
speaking through all these things, and you see 
what power the abstract ideal gains when it 
shines in the power of a great human being. 

Jesus is the sublimest conscience in the history 
of the world ; that conscience is set in with the 
tenderest and richest humanity, and both are per- 
vaded by the most engaging and commanding 
spirit. To be found well-pleasing in his sight is 
a great task, but it is a possible task because of 
the fascination of his divine personality, because 
the ideal in his sympathies, his compassions, his 
tendernesses, his graces, his loves, is able to raise 
men from moral death. What the idealism of 
Plato could not do, what the heroism of the Stoic 
could not do, Jesus by his ideal working through 
his sympathies did for the poorest creatures in 
the Roman Empire ; He lifted out of the slums, 
out of the depths a multitude of wretched souls 
and turned them into soldiers of the Ideal, lovers 
of God, victors in the fight for righteousness, 
such as no age or nation had ever seen. Our end 
is personal ; it is to be found well-pleasing in the 
presence of Him who is the Truth and the Good- 
ness and the Beauty of our human world. 



THE MORAL IDEAL IN CHRIST 273 

2. A few words must here follow about the aim 
of the Chris tiau life. In nature ends realize them- 
selves. The seed grows without effort to the per- 
fect flower ; the tree advances without aim from 
the acorn to the magnificent oak ; the eagle in 
the Qgg comes to the eagle on the wing without 
conscious purpose : the harmless cub, that you 
might easily mistake for the pup of a Newfound- 
land dog, grows naturally into the king of the 
forest ; the infant in its mother's arms becomes 
the mature man by the force of law. On the 
plane of nature the end realizes itseK ; there is 
no need of conscious aim ; the end is the one 
great master. 

When you come to the sphere of character it 
is different. In the rational and spiritual life of 
man, the aim must supplement the end. Your 
ideal is knowledge ; it is a glorious end. Can you 
ever hope to approach it without effort ? Your 
ideal is success in business ; will that ever come 
without toil ? You desire eminence as a lawyer, 
as a physician, as a man of letters. Will that end 
ever be realized without well-directed endeavor? 
Thus when you come to character, to the control 
of your life in the light and by the might of an 
end, the end is impotent unless the aim corre- 
sponds to the end. Here we come upon one of the 
saddest things in human ^ life, — the sub-human 
existence, the aimless life, aimless because it has 



274 REVELATION AND THE IDEAL 

never found an end. There are so many human 
beings that go like the seaweed on the tide, out 
and in, out and in, tossed hither, carried thither. 
They are like the shuttle without the thread in 
it, flying to and fro and achieving nothing. The 
aimless life is a sub-human life ; it is thrown from 
instinct to instinct, from object of desire to ob- 
ject of desire, as an unmoored boat is tossed from 
wave to wave, backwards and forwards to no pur- 
pose, in utter weariness, in pitiless sport and 
pain. 

Millions of our fellow-men are living that sub- 
human life, endless and aimless. Another class, 
higher up and at the same time lower down, and 
found chiefly in the churches of Christ through- 
out the world, is composed of those who have 
forgotten the supreme end of life. You remember 
that story in the " Odyssey " about the lotus- 
eaters ; you remember Odysseus took his men to 
see them and when his men had eaten the lotus- 
flower it took away all desire for their return. 
They forgot the boat, they forgot the sea, they 
forgot Ithaca, they forgot home ; they became 
men with a forgotten goal, an abandoned ideal. 
This is one of the deepest tragedies in the spir- 
itual life of our land ; multitudes have forgotten 
the Christian end of living ; they have eaten the 
lotus-flower of suddenly acquired wealth, the lo- 
tus-flower of surprising worldly success, the drug 



THE MOBAL IDEAL IN CHRIST 275 

of amusement and pleasure, the narcotic of the 
beauty of the world, the anaesthetic of deliver- 
ance from the old strenuous and troubled life 
into that of sensuous happiness and pleasant 
dreams. The churches are crowded, wherever 
they are, crowded, with people of this descrip- 
tion ; they are full of those who have eaten the 
lotus-flower and who have forgotten the glorious 
home whither they were bound ; they have lost 
the desire to exert themselves or in any way 
serve and suffer and tread with Christ the wine- 
press and beat out with Him in affliction the 
spirit that transforms and saves the world. 

You hear it from me often, but I say it in all 
solemnity, that there is not enough Christianity 
in our churches to harm the weakest kind of a 
devil anywhere ! A few, a glorious few, there are 
for whom end and aim are correspondent ; but 
the number of those who, under the influence 
of suddenly acquired wealth, suddenly acquired 
power over the sources of the world's enjoyment, 
and sudden emancipation from old traditions and 
conventions, who have forgotten the glorious 
idealism of the past, who do not answer it with 
the awe and devotion of their fathers, is a vast 
and sad multitude. 

Some who have not gone so far in the bad way 
are yet like children sent on an errand, who have 
almost forgotten what their errand was about, who 



276 BEVELATION AND THE IDEAL 

stagger toward it, finally tumble up against it, 
get it and stagger home, and do not really know 
whether they got it or not ! They are like chil- 
dren returning from school and taking the whole 
afternoon for the return. That is another exam- 
ple of our everyday Christianity. Is this too 
plain? My answer is that there is no earthly use 
in preaching if we cannot speak the truth to one 
another in love. 

What should Christianity be ? A glorious end, 
a great aim, and an honest achievement. Many of 
you remember one of the great events of the scien- 
tific world, the transit of Venus across the disk of 
the sun. You recall that expeditions were sent out 
by several of the leading governments of the earth, 
that scientific men from different positions of 
favor might observe that transcendent phenome- 
non. Scientific literature is usually dispassionate 
and one is not ordinarily moved to tears by it ; 
it is not written for that purpose. But there are 
some scientific descriptions of that event to which 
I have referred that have in them the awe and the 
power of a great religious experience. What was 
the event? There was the mighty sun, clear, 
steady, glorious. There was the beautiful planet 
that swung across his disk. There was the great 
glass of the astronomer ; the glorious end, the 
high aim, and the permanent and precious scien- 
tific result. That in symbol is our Christianity. 



THE MORAL IDEAL IN CHRIST 277 

Our glorious Master, Christ, is our end ; our aim 
is to be found, whether present or absent, whe- 
ther in time or eternity, well-pleasing unto Him ! 
We aim at becoming like Him, so exalted in in- 
tellect, so purified in heart, made so great, true, 
and tender in spirit that when we come into the 
presence of his soul we shall be found agreeable 
to his will. That is Christianity. 

May that ultimate end of our existence loom 
in our vision to-day with something of its native 
and ineffable splendor. May it initiate, develop, 
direct, and consummate the spiritual energies of 
our soul ! May it through our vision support in 
steadiness, in unbroken continuity, in deathless 
extension and growth an aim correspondent with 
its own beauty and benignity. If we could bring 
this human world to look at the Lord as those 
astronomers did at the sun, and aim at Him as 
they aimed at their object, we should speedily 
have a new heaven and a new earth wherein 
dwelleth righteousness, and the roar and the tu- 
mult of brothers in conflict, in the bitterness of 
deatUy feud from end to end of our divided and 
afflicted world, would forever die away. 



XXI 

THE APOSTOLIC IDEAL 

♦' Wherefore, O King Agrippa, I was not disobedient to the heavenly 
vision." 

Acts XXVI, 19. 

The ends for which all men live are visions. 
Wherever the satisfaction sought is not immedi- 
ate, wherever the goal is distant, its image at 
once takes possession of the imagination and 
there generates the impulse that sustains the 
achieving activity. When we say that one man 
works for wealth, another for station, another 
for learning, another for righteousness, and stiU 
another for baseness, we are not clear and we are 
not thorough in our description. The simple truth 
is that they aU are striving for ends or goals, and 
these ends or goals are visions. Croesus of old 
and his type in our own time pursue a vision ; the 
vision is of wealth ; still it is a vision. Scaliger^ 
Bentley, Sir William Hamilton seek knowledge ; 
it is the vision of learning, rich, wide, deep, ex- 
act, and vast in which they toil. Webster and 
Clay and Calhoun, so distinguished in public serv- 
ice, so justly famous for achievement, were caught 
by the vision of station. Caesar, Cromwell, and 
Napoleon sought power ; they lived and fought in 



THE APOSTOLIC IDEAL 279 

the vision of empire. So far all men are alike ; 
action is everywhere the issue of vision; Judas 
and John, in utter contrast as they are in char- 
acter, are at one here. Both visualize the ends 
they seek; both live in vision. 

Paul stands preeminent among men of vision, 
because his vision was heavenly and because of 
his unswerving and passionate pursuit of it to the 
last breath of life. The character of his vision sets 
him apart and makes him worthy of considera- 
tion ; the strength, the continuity, and the poetic 
passion of his devotion to his ideal lend high dis- 
tinction to his career. We wish to know about 
his vision and its value for men to-day. 

As we consider this vision of Paul, we shall 
find in it, I think, a present power, a backward 
reference, a forward significance ; as we look into 
it, we shall see an immediate experience, a historic 
reality, a future and universal ideal. Jesus speaks 
from the unseen ; the unseen Jesus who speaks 
to Saul of Tarsus calls into the vividness of 
lightning his own life on earth ; the unseen Jesus 
who commissions this new apostle is to be the 
ideal for him and all men forever. 

1. The heavenly vision is first of all a present 
power, an immediate experience. From the un- 
seen Jesus searched Paul's conscience, sounded 
the depths of his heart, appealed to his will with 
reasonable but sovereign power. From the un- 



280 REVELATION AND THE IDEAL 

seen Paul was arrested ; in the presence of the 
living spirit of Jesus a tempest rose in his life. 
There his past stood forth branded with shame ; 
there his soul renounced it ; there he received new 
light upon the character and mission of the Lord ; 
there he received power to become a new man, 
to rise up in the fullness of a new, a tremendous 
and at the same time a joyous experience. Paul's 
heavenly vision was the vision of the soul of Je- 
sus living in the unseen and mighty ; and it 
meant an immediate release from error and wick- 
edness, an immediate introduction to right-mind- 
edness, humane feeling, moral power and hope. 
Paul has made two great discoveries ; he has seen 
the living soul of the Lord and he has seen as 
never before his own soul. 

Here is the vital point in Christianity. It is 
not first a historic tradition or a vista of the fu- 
ture on earth and in the eternal. It is first of aU. 
an appeal to the conscience. It is nothing till it 
has begun a revolution in the soul to whom it 
comes. The past is dead, the future is a vain 
dream till the spirit in man is spoken to by the 
Spirit of the Lord. When the captain is far out 
on the high seas, when he has been driven by 
long, dark, and terrible days under stress of 
weather, and all at once the clouds lift and the 
sun breaks forth at noon, the first thing that 
the captain does is to find at what point in his 



TBE APOSTOLIC IDEAL 281 

voyage he has arrived. Till that point is deter- 
mined he can say nothing about the port from 
which he sailed or the harbor whither he is 
bound. He must have an immediate location of 
his ship, an immediate experience of light and 
certainty. Till the soul is arrested in its error, 
brought to a pause in its selfishness and indif- 
ference ; till its unworthy character is defined 
and branded before its eyes, and the sense of the 
majesty of right, the beauty of holiness, the 
glory of humane service for ideal ends take pos- 
session of the heart ; till the appeal from the liv- 
ing Lord in the unseen moves the foundations of 
being, brings about the great renunciation of all 
wrong and inhumanity, and the new consecration 
to the advance of the kingdom of man, the his- 
tory of Jesus is but a dream and the future ref- 
erence of his career only poetic fiction. There 
is no reality in the study of Jesus till He speaks 
in the present tense, till He is discovered as 
the moral regenerator and Sovereign of the soul. 
The zenith is over your head where you stand or 
sit ; the nadir is under your feet. The supreme 
question is your present relation to the Lord ; 
the eternal height is over you now, the eternal 
depth is under you. 

The study of the Lord is not an academic ques- 
tion ; it is not a merely literary or historical 
study ; it is supremely a concern of life. Nothing 



282 BEV ELATION AND THE IDEAL 

but vanity can come of these studies till we see 
the living Lord and feel his message working in 
our conscience. We study the Lord to be meas- 
ured and to be weighed. If when weighed in his 
balances we are found wanting, we know what we 
should do. It is the vital interest and not the 
sentimental ; it is the conscientious concern and 
not the aesthetic that is sovereign in our faith. 
The sun may shine on the mountain-top whither 
the climber is bound ; it may flood with its light 
the valley that he has left behind ; but if at the 
spot where the mountaineer is threading his per- 
ilous way the cloud is thick and dark, what com- 
fort is it to him to be assured that the beginning 
and the end of his path are in splendor? Where 
he is he needs light ; where he climbs he needs 
the guidance of the heavenly help. Where men 
are they need to be spoken to ; at the task of the 
hour, in the present temptation and sorrow and 
wrong the appeal of Christ must be heard. They 
need to see Him as the light of life ; they need 
to confess his transforming might. The primary 
thing in Christianity is the vision of the Soul of 
the living Lord and the response to the Lord of 
the soul of the beholder. The immediate experi- 
ence is supreme. There the Lord stands revealed ; 
there the disciple answers the caU. Soul has 
found soul, the Soul of Jesus the soul of his 
servant. 



THE APOSTOLIC IDEAL 283 

2. Paul's vision leads Mm to look backward ; 
his experience under the appeal of Jesus in the 
unseen issues in fresh insight into the earthly 
career of the Lord. We greatly err if we fail to 
see the richness and reality of the historic Jesus 
behind Paul's vision of the Eternal Christ. One 
precious saying we owe to this apostle recorded 
by no other hand : " Remember the words of the 
Lord Jesus that he himself said, It is more blessed 
to give than to receive." Again he opens to the 
heart the earthly ministry of Jesus when he 
writes : " For ye know the grace of our Lord 
Jesus Christ, that though he was rich yet for 
your sake he became poor, that ye through his 
poverty might become rich." Behind his experi- 
ence is the sense of that divine life ; its grace 
and truth have become vivid and great to Paul's 
soul. He speaks much of the death of Christ, 
but the death receives all its value from the per- 
son who died ; the apostle glories in the resurrec- 
tion of the Lord, but again the value of the re- 
surrection is its judgment upon the worth of his 
Master. He is the preacher of a spiritual reli- 
gion ; but that the religion may not be confused 
with some beautiful dream he sees it as it lay in 
the manger in Bethlehem, as it grew with the 
years in Nazareth, as it came to the full con- 
sciousness of itself at the Jordan, as it went about 
doing good, teaching, preaching, healing, consol- 



284 REVELATION AND THE IDEAL 

ing, and saving in the human soul of Jesus. 
Paul's vision of the invisible Christ sought the 
career of the historic Jesus and rooted itself 
there. 

The present vital experience is always the 
open gateway into the past. If we are doing 
nothing noble ourselves, and if we care nothing 
for what serious men are doing to-day, it is im- 
possible that any part of the past should appear 
great to us. Because men and women love now, 
they turn with eagerness to the glorious lovers in 
generations gone by; because men and women 
toil, struggle, hope, fear, rejoice and weep to- 
day, they wish to know of others greater than 
themselves who went the same wild mysterious 
way. Earnestness in the conduct of one's own 
life is the indispensable condition of any deep 
and true appreciation of the past. The best book 
on Wellington has been written by Lord Eoberts. 
Lincoln, we may be sure, got nearer the heart of 
Washington during those seven terrible years 
of the Eevolution when Lincoln stood at the helm 
of state those other terrible years of fraternal 
war. 

The really great things of the past are hidden 
from the frivolous and superficial. The great 
painting, the great statue, the monumental build- 
ing, book, or life, cannot reveal its character to 
the idle spectator. Earnestness, manhood m the 



THE APOSTOLIC IDEAL 285 

present hour, the spirit that has become the ser- 
vant of the race, is essential to the existence of 
insight into the great things that men have done. 
No man can become a genuine hero-worshiper 
till he has accepted the difficult task of his own 
life, till he has settled himself in the steadfast 
and endless endeavor to be in his obscure corner 
of the world a true hero. 

It is rarely the case that children appreciate 
noble parents. Their parents seem to them too 
austere, too fond of worth, not fond enough of 
good times, too careless of the pleasures of sense, 
engrossed and lost often in the gloom of great 
causes. What is the reason for this failure ? The 
reason is that children are children, full of the 
spirit of play, under the spell of the senses, not 
yet awake to the meaning of life. Wait a few 
years, wait till the passion of earnestness has 
been freed within them, till the burden of re- 
sponsibility rests upon their shoulders, till great 
tasks confront them, many difficulties crowd 
round them, and hopes and fears beat in their 
blood as they behold their worlds of love under 
threat and menace. Then they turn to the past 
with open vision ; they see again and perhaps 
through regret and tears the dead father, the 
vanished mother, building a home of beauty for 
them, defending them against the evils of exist- 
ence, speaking in a hundred ways to all that 



286 REVELATION AND THE IDEAL 

was best in them, nourishing body, mind, and 
soul, educating the full power of the personality, 
piously and lovingly girding them for the strug- 
gle, and by the precept and yet more by the ex- 
ample of wisdom covering their head in the day 
of battle. The reward of Jesus came to Him in 
the unseen when Paul and such as he, under the 
might of a new experience, looked back and saw 
how divinely the Lord had lived. The reward of 
the best parents comes to them in the heavenly 
world when they see their children under the bur- 
den and heat of the day turning to the sacred 
record of hitherto unappreciated goodness with 
devouring eyes and tender, understanding hearts. 
What is true of history in its greatness as a 
whole, what is true of the best family life of the 
race, is profoundly true of the life recorded in 
the Four Gospels. We cannot see its height and 
depth, nor at all understand its divine regard 
for men till we have ourselves renounced the 
devil of selfishness and all his works, till we have 
set up in our own inmost heart ideals of truth 
and beauty and goodness, till we have taken vows 
never to cease in the service of these ideals while 
life shall last, till we have wrought righteousness 
and been misunderstood and perhaps hated for 
our work, till we have suffered as an evildoer 
when we were doing God's holy and compassion- 
ate will. Then the life of the Lord will seem to 



THE APOSTOLIC IDEAL 287 

US what it has seemed to all true men, the one 
incomparable and divine life. That life will then 
come to us like the morning, flooding our being 
with its light and peace. Bethlehem, Nazareth, 
the Sea of Galilee, the Jordan, Judaea, and Jeru- 
salem will be symbols of a history in which all 
that is highest in you has root. Because you are 
a conscientious man, serving to-day with a sin- 
cere and glad heart in the kingdom of God, you 
turn to the manger and the cross with eyes able 
to read something of the meaning of the birth of 
Jesus, able to see a little way into the infinite 
consolation in the infinite mystery of existence, 
the issue of the life eternal through death. 

When one enters the St. Gotthard Tunnel he 
is not at all impressed with the scene that he has 
left behind. When he comes out from the moun- 
tain for the third time and each time higher up, he 
begins to take in the glory of the world that was 
always there. Only when the present hour takes 
us higher in moral consecration, only when we 
issue from the elevations of earnest and devoted 
living, only when some immediate experience of 
God's spirit has set us on the heights, can we see 
the best things in the life of man and behold the 
glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. 

3. The third interest in Paul's vision is the 
universal human ideal that issues from it. After 
that vision Paul's life was one long, uridiscour- 



288 REVELATION AND THE IDEAL 

aged, and joyous pursuit of the ideal of character 
given in it. He saw the Lord Jesus in his per- 
fect humanity ; thereafter he strove with all his 
might to become like his Master. Nor did he 
limit the privilege to himself. Sonhood to God 
through Christ and brotherhood of man to man 
became the universal privilege, the universal ideal. 
Christ had become the revelation of God's design 
in every human soul ; he had become the final 
meaning of all man's desires and strivings and 
hopes. The heavenly vision was the vision of man 
released from all sin, all selfishness, all discord, 
all woe ; the vision of man redeemed to the life 
of moral freedom and perfect love. The goal for 
Paul, the goal for man was to be like the Lord 
Jesus. You see the great artist at sunset striving 
to put upon his canvas an image of that mystery 
of beauty ; such was Paul's heavenly vision. To 
the end his passion was to put the image of it in 
his heart and to help others in the same high 
endeavor. 

Here comes in the deadliest doubt of our time. 
Is it true that ideals influence the course of his- 
tory, the life of society, the families of men? Is 
it possible for the heart to be obedient to the 
heavenly vision? No. That I have called our 
most fatal doubt. It is supported by a superficial 
parade of physical science. It is said the action 
of the heart is not affected by theories, the circu- 



THE APOSTOLIC IDEAL 289 

lation of the blood, the process of nutrition, the 
act of breathing ; the same thing is true of nu- 
merous other functions of the body. Even this 
is over-statement. The functions of the body are 
promoted by wholesome thought, they are inter- 
rupted by morbid thought. While much in our 
life is at its best when involuntary, as if admin- 
istered for us by the indwelling Maker, every 
.crisis that arises reveals the universal presence 
in us of mind, able to support order with wise 
thought, able to overturn order with unwise 
thought. The bearing of a sound and pure mind 
upon the processes of the body is obvious to 
every serious and noble thinker. 

Ideals are a delight ; delights when continuous 
influence life. They make men happier, of bet- 
ter temper, a comfort to themselves, generous 
and good companions to others. To the extent 
that ideals give pleasure they must influence life 
deeply, to the extent that they give nobler pleas- 
ure they reform existence. Paul's vision was a 
conscientious joy ; it was a sublime delight and 
an abiding one. As such it made him a new man. 

It is, indeed, clear as sunlight that ideals con- 
trol the direction of existence. The daring voyage 
of Columbus, the mighty achievement of Magel- 
lan, the triumph of Vasco da Gama, the hard- 
ship endured and the conquest won by every ex- 
plorer set among the follies of thought the denial 



290 REVELATION AND THE IDEAL 

of the power of the ideal. All effort is initiated, 
sustained, and carried to its goal by the vision 
of an ideal. It was not biological influence but 
spiritual vision that controlled the course of 
Paul's life. That vision made him a preacher of 
Christ instead of a persecutor, a prophet of free- 
dom instead of a forger of chains. 

There is an obvious place for the ideal in the 
constitution of man. There is a multiplicity of 
forces in human life ; a hierarchy must be estab- 
lished among these forces, one interest must be 
in subordination to another, one function must 
defer to a higher. A watch is first a multiplicity 
of parts, then an organization of parts, and 
finally the expression of a sovereign purpose. 
Many things, many things working together, 
many things so working together as to record 
the progress of the day ; that is a watch. A hu- 
man being is first a multitude of forces ; then he 
is these forces in unity and working together ; 
finally he is these forces so organized and so 
working that they keep the total man in har- 
mony with his total environment. On the dial 
of the normal human life there is recorded the 
progress of the Day of the Lord. 

We understand the amenableness of passion 
to reason. " I thought on my ways, and I turned 
my feet unto thy testimonies " ; " Wherewithal 
shall a young man cleanse his way ? By taking 



THE APOSTOLIC IDEAL 291 

heed thereto according to thy word " ; " Thy 
word is a lamp unto my feet and a light unto my 
path" ; '' And when he came to himself he said, 
I will arise and go to my Father." These are a 
few of the multitude of witnesses to the power 
of the mind over the courses of desire. The ani- 
mal becomes dumb when faced and spoken to by 
the Christian mind. Look at the trainer among 
wild beasts, watch how they do his will ; mightier 
than he they cower at his feet and acknowledge 
the supremacy of his mind. Look within at the 
cage of wild beasts in your own soul ; face them 
with the lash of conscience in your hand; com- 
mand and beat them into silence. Soon they will 
know which is master, that they cannot fight the 
right and prevail against it, that their place and 
peace are in obedience to your conscientious will. 
If it is sometimes true that ideals bring less 
than they promise, we must bear in mind that 
they are forever. They teach us that our work 
as servants of righteousness is not only for this 
world but also for all worlds. Our ideals give 
endless perspective to the moral life of man ; 
they teach us that our future is bound up with 
the eternal years. The insatiable heart is one 
perpetual prophecy of the magnitude of man ; 
the ideal that flies as it is pursued, that glows 
with a new, unattained glory with every fresh 
act of obedience is the second great assurance 



292 REVELATION AND THE IDEAL 

that God has made us for ends greater than we 
know. " My soul is athirst for God, the living 
God" ; there is one note of man's greatness. " It 
doth not yet appear what we shall be " ; there is 
the other. The heavenly vision is at once the 
rapture and the despair of the soul ; it sees and 
pursues but cannot overtake the awful gladness. 
So we pursue the horizon line ; we never can 
touch it, because as we move it moves ; but our 
pursuit is not therefore in vain, for in this way 
we are led home. 

Home to God Paul's vision brought him, home 
through a world of care, trial, suffering, and 
service, home to the fulfillment of life's highest 
hope. Home to God our vision of Christ will 
bring us, home through the wild and stormy 
years, home after the toil and the fever of life 
in time, home when our day's work is done. 
We have seen his star in the east. We cannot 
approach and seize that heavenly splendor ; but 
we may follow its light and be led by that light 
to the Infinite Tenderness and Peace. 



XXII 
THE IDEAL OF THE PATRIOT 

" But Jerusalem which is above ia free, which is the mother of us all." 

Gal. IV, 26. 

Paul sees before him two Jerusalems, one that 
is above and one that is under ; one that is free 
and one that is in bondage ; one that is bound 
to pass utterly away and one that has the cer- 
tain assurance of permanence. Best of all, he 
sees that the Jerusalem that is above, that is free, 
that is everlasting, is the mother of us all. No- 
thing could better voice the sentiments of all 
true Americans to-day than these words of the 
great-hearted Jew who became a Christian. There 
are before us to-day two nations : one that is from 
above and one that is from beneath ; one that is 
free and one that is in the servitude of wicked- 
ness; one that we believe is under sentence of 
doom and one that has the promise of perma- 
nence and final ascendancy. But best of all, the 
nation that is from above, that is free and pro- 
phetically victorious, is the mother of us all. 
We come, then, to the great message of the text, 
feeling that it is pertinent to the needs of this 
hour. 



294 REVELATION AND THE IDEAL 

1. The first thing in the apostle's words is the 
vision of an ideal Jerusalem. He was fond of 
history ; no one in that age had anything like so 
profound a sense of it. He loved to go back to 
the migration of the first Hebrew ; to repeat the 
history of Israel under Moses ; to dwell upon the 
great work that God had done for his people in 
the past ; to mark off the history of his nation 
as in a profound and peculiar sense the history 
of the revelation of God to man. He knew the 
annals of Jerusalem by heart. No Jew of his 
time had read with a deeper thrill of joy of 
David's capture of the city, of his transforma- 
tion of it ; no one had surveyed with more pa- 
triotic satisfaction what had been glorious in the 
reigns of subsequent kings, whatever had been 
mighty in the utterances of the great succession 
of prophets. The heroic associations and immor- 
tal memories that gathered about the actual Jeru- 
salem had more power over his heart than they 
possessed for any other. 

Still, he felt that the history had been poor. 
There was an aboriginal promise behind it all, 
within sight of which, in the actual development 
of the nation, it had never come. There were 
impulses in the national heart deeper and diviner 
than any historic expression that they had yet 
received; there was a vision in the mind of the 
great prophetic leaders of Israel that had never 



THE IDEAL OF THE PATRIOT 295 

attained anything like embodiment in the life of 
the people. Therefore, in the interest of what 
was deepest in history he turned away from it ; 
in behalf of what was noblest in the actual he 
turned toward the ideal. So far the entire record 
of his nation had been a failure — a failure to 
utter in its life the revelation of truth and bro- 
therhood made to it. 

This seems to me the inevitable position for 
the Christian patriot in America to-day. He is 
more impressed than other men by the actual 
achievements upon these shores ; by the landing 
of the Pilgrims, by the advance of colonial life ; 
by the Declaration of Independence, the battle 
for inalienable rights to a victorious issue and 
the organization of the government ; by the swift 
and wonderful development of the country's re- 
sources, the successful struggle to maintain the 
unity and integrity of the nation, and the settle- 
ment of the gigantic moral question of slavery; 
by the concurrent growth of schools, colleges, 
and universities ; by the deepening and spread- 
ing power of Christianity as expressed in a thou- 
sand different agencies ; and by the great intel- 
lects, the great characters, the great servants 
that have been our guides. The Christian patriot 
can see a light in the silver stars of the old flag 
and a depth in its crimson bars visible to no 
other eyes. He better than aU others can estimate 



296 REVELATION AND THE IDEAL 

the inspiration that has worked in the conscious- 
ness of our people, the moral energy needed to 
bring us where we are, the suffering involved, 
and the magnificent careers that, through this 
tremendous discipline, have been given to the 
country and the world. There is not a single 
noble tradition in Old Virginia or in Old Mas- 
sachusetts that he does not cherish, no great 
name from Washington to Lincoln that he does 
not venerate, no battle for righteousness in the 
whole history that does not set his heart on fire. 
The Christian patriot sees more to honor and 
admire in our history than any other man ; the 
whole past is to him deeper, richer, more august, 
more divinely tender than to any other. 

Nevertheless, he is profoundly dissatisfied with 
what it has been, with what it is to-day. The 
dream of the Pilgrim burns like an immortal 
daybreak in the beginning of our history, and 
the full day has not yet come. The vision em- 
bodied in the Declaration of Independence is 
still an ideal unrealized. The profound and noble 
ideas that lie at the basis of our political insti- 
tutions have so far received no such expression 
as they must have. The deepest and divinest 
forces in the consciousness of our people have 
had, as yet, no utterance worthy of them. And, 
therefore, we turn away from what has been to 
what shall be ; from the actual to the ideal 



THE IDEAL OF THE PATRIOT 297 

country ; from the America that is below to the 
America that is above. 

2. The second thing that impresses us in the 
words of the text is that Paul looks upon the 
ideal Jerusalem as the real Jerusalem. The city 
that had been false to the idea upon which it 
was founded — the idea of the supremacy of the 
righteous Lord, that had obstructed the purpose 
of its best rulers, that had stoned the prophets 
and killed the men of genius and sublime char- 
acter who had been sent into it ; that Jerusalem, 
although built upon a rock, composed of stable 
dwellings and an imposing temple, isolated from 
attack by ravines to right and left, and sur- 
rounded by a great wall; that Jerusalem was 
but a dream, a nightmare, a horrid ghost that 
must vanish. The Jerusalem that had no exist- 
ence except in the morning thoughts of the first 
of the Hebrews, in the pious longings of the de- 
vouter leaders, and in the burning conceptions 
of the prophets ; that city which had a full home 
nowhere but in the mind of Christ, which had 
no local habitation, no temple, and no bulwarks 
for the national eye, that city Paul affirmed to 
be the real city. You can think of the contempt 
with which an unconverted Pharisee or Sadducee 
of that time would look upon the Christian fan- 
atic matching his imagination against a great 
historic institution. It would have seemed to him 



298 REVELATION AND THE IDEAL 

the sheerest drivel, worthy of nothing but to be 
drowned with floods of ridicule. But what says 
the subsequent history ? The Jerusalem of the 
old Jew is gone ; the Jerusalem of the apostle 
has been the great inspiration of the ages, and 
it is the great reality of to-day. What was called 
the reality has vanished forever; what was 
called the imagination abides. 

The ideal America is the real America. If you 
wish to know the everlasting America, look into 
the minds of its great patriots, into the thoughts 
of its deepest prophets. Out of the ideal country 
has come our entire moral strength. Out of the 
ideal came the origin of the country, and for all 
our inspirations in all our times of need our 
mightiest leaders have gone to the same source. 
When a new home is founded, it is built and 
ordered in obedience to the vision of love. Chil- 
dren in every true family have behind them the 
divine dream of parenthood. They are trained, 
carried forward from infancy, and on into the 
years of self-help by the energy of a transfigured 
thought. When they come to manhood and 
womanhood, their hearts begin to bum, and they 
discover that the Lord is shaping the ideal in 
them. Out of the conception of the more perfect 
all art, all literature, all social order, all politi- 
cal life that is not retrograde, is forever bom. 
Nothing is so real as the ideal ; it builds itself 



THE IDEAL OF THE PATRIOT 299 

ten thousand times into tlie actual course of 
events, and still it is burdened with an infinite 
reserve. Think of the summers and autumns 
that have come and gone since civilized man put 
foot upon these shores. How the whole face of 
nature has flowered, how the entire earth has 
come to the abundant harvest for man and beast. 
How much this great region has done in the way 
of pageant and in the way of fruitfulness. What 
a history of beauty and of useful growth it has 
had. Why is it not spent ? Why is it good for a 
thousand summers and autumns more? Because 
there is life in it, because that life is fed from 
the great sun. Not the wonderful expressions in 
flower and fruit are the reality, but the hidden, 
unexhausted, and inexhaustible life out of which 
these pageants and harvests have come. And so 
the deepest reality lies not in our homes, our so- 
cieties, our literature, our arts, our government, 
our history ; it lies in the creative source of all 
these, in the living ideals that are within the 
human soul, and which are fed from the heart of 
God. You see a handful of men and women de- 
voted to the education of the colored race in our 
land. They carry in their prayers and thoughts 
the reality which shall yet replace the wretched 
actual that to-day seems so strong. You see a 
small number of devoted souls determined that 
slavery shall die ; their determination, not the 



300 REVELATION AND THE IDEAL 

actual bondage of the slave, is the reality. You 
look in upon a prayer-meeting at Williams Col- 
lege ; there and not in the degradation of heathen 
man is the everlasting reality. You watch a monk 
revolt from his works of penance, retreat upon 
God in Christ for the deliverance of his soul, and 
return in the thunder of power to proclaim that 
man shall live not upon rite or priest or institu- 
tion, but upon immediate communion with the 
Eternal ; and you find in that monk's soul, in 
his imagination, the reality that has transformed 
the old world into the new. You go back to a 
tent-maker from Tarsus, and you see him turn- 
ing away from the history of his people, turning 
to the unseen where his Master lived, and gather- 
ing from that realm the forces that enabled him 
to change the face of the world, and to leave 
upon the Eoman Empire marks deeper than were 
made by the whole succession of the Csesars. There 
in the soul of that tent-maker is the divine real- 
ity. You behold a speaker upon a hillside, a suf- 
ferer upon the cross, a presence of light from be- 
yond death, and there in the mind of Christ you 
recognize the whole sublime and final reality for 
mankind. Heaven and earth shall pass away, 
government after government, but the words 
of Christ, his living, creative thought for man 
shall abide, and out of it shall come a new heaven 
and a new earth. 



THE IDEAL OF THE PATRIOT 301 

In the presence of these facts we are justified 
in holding that the ideal nation is the real na- 
tion. We side with the dreams of the Pilgrims, 
with the visions of the founders of the nation, 
with the thoughts of its greatest leaders, with 
the love of those who died for it, with the sor- 
row and hope of all those who have served it well, 
with the purpose of God in Christ in its behalf, 
and we claim that the America that is still un- 
realized is our true and everlasting country. 

3. The third fact in the text to which I wish 
to call attention are the two great characteristics 
of the Jerusalem which is above. It is free, and 
it includes all. It is the city of freedom and 
catholicity. In both respects it was in absolute 
contrast to the actual Jerusalem. That city was 
in bondage ; it was the slave of innumerable preju- 
dices and traditions, the victim above all of its 
own blind and evil heart. It was also the most 
fiercely exclusive of cities. Bigoted, intolerant, 
exclusive, and mad; these were the characteris- 
tics which it presented in the presence of Paul's 
Christian dream of a fellowship of perfect free- 
dom and complete catholicity. 

How can we live if we do not see the same 
vision for this country ? We see the strife, the 
division, the organization of capital and labor 
into opposite camps, and surely we must pray for 
freedom from this sore and widespread bondage. 



302 REVELATION AND THE IDEAL 

We see the prevalence of ignorance of all sorts — 
ignorance in personal conduct, ignorance of the 
true life of the home, ignorance of thrift, igno- 
rance of the great moral necessities, personal, do- 
mestic, national, human, without obedience to 
which society cannot hold together; and again 
we must grieve over this oppression. We behold 
the existence of the multitude of our fellow-citi- 
zens confined mostly to a struggle for physical 
existence with the most distressing and wide-ex- 
tending disregard of the whole upper side of life. 
We are a Pentecostal nation in the number and 
heterogeneous character of the people in our 
midst ; we are a Pentecostal nation in the great- 
ness of our sins and in the depth of our moral 
need, in our disregard of the ideal, in our con- 
tempt for Christ and our consequent unrest and 
trouble. Shall we not become a Pentecostal na- 
tion in regret and grief for our sins, in the 
glorious insight into the meaning of Christ for 
our time and need, in the new experience of sal- 
vation in his name ? We cannot rest, as Chris- 
tian citizens, until the profounder emancipation 
shall come, until the freedom which is our na- 
tional boast shall mean freedom from eternal di- 
vision, from a soul-destroying materialism, from 
contempt of the ideal of Christian brotherhood. 
Oh, how the great word freedom is abused ! 
Freedom is not the first but the final attainment 



THE IDEAL OF THE PATRIOT 303 

of men and nations. It can come only through 
the will that stands in happy surrender to the 
Christian intelligence. " Ye shall know the truth 
and the truth shall make you free." Look into 
some room in our institutions for the insane, and 
see some poor man sure that he is a millionaire, 
that he is a great poet, that he is the greatest 
force in the life of the country, and at once you 
grieve over the delusion. But that delusion is not 
any deeper, nor is it half so debasing as the no- 
tion that the man is free who knows hardly any- 
thing of the moral order of his existence, and 
who ignores in conduct the little that he does 
know. That is the most fundamental and fatal 
of all delusions. The man who is the victim of 
drink or lust, or any vile habit, we cannot pro- 
nounce free ; nor the nation that disregards the 
moral ideal, that cares nothing for Christ, that 
soaks itself in the swamps of a godless material- 
ism. For that man or that nation to boast of 
freedom is a delusion as deep as the sad preten- 
sions of the insane. If the Son shall make you 
free, then shall ye be free, indeed. The realiza- 
tion of freedom is through the realization of son- 
ship ; the America which is above is alone free. 
Thank God it is also the mother of us all. 
General Grant used to say to the Confederates 
during the war that it was for their interest to 
be beaten. The few political speeches that he ever 



304 REVELATION AND THE IDEAL 

made were to the same effect. He told his old 
friend and brave lieutenant, General Hancock, 
and the great body of his fellow-citizens who sup- 
ported him in the presidential campaign of 1880, 
that their true success was to be defeated. The 
speech was brief, but it was full of the great 
soldier's wisdom and magnanimity. He looked 
upon battles and he fought them with all his 
might ; but he looked beyond them to the common 
good in which they issued. The cause that won, 
the honor that was preserved, and the confidence 
that was renewed in us as a nation throughout 
the world belong to all the people. Through the 
form of victory in one case, through the form of 
defeat in another, the common good of all was 
secured. The defeat of bad causes is the supreme 
hope of those who support them ; the triumph of 
righteousness is never a partisan or sectional 
victory — it is a victory for humanity. 

This leads us to look into the deepest struggle 
now going on among us. There is the conflict 
between the Christian interpretation of the nation 
and the atheistic ; between a spiritual view of our 
great fellowship in industry, in art, in science, in 
citizenship, in humanity, and a materialistic; 
between the believer in the ideal and the scoffer 
at it, between those who include the supreme good 
of their country in the coming of the kingdom of 
God and those whose conception of welfare is a 



THE IDEAL OF THE PATRIOT 305 

vulgar and vicious selfishness. This is the cam- 
paign that lies back of all others, this is the tre- 
mendous duel in which all the disciples of Christ 
are involved, this is the battle that divides the 
country into two great hostile camps. There are 
the seekers after God and the essential good of 
the people ; and there are the self-seekers in the 
vulgar sense, and often in the vicious, and not 
infrequently in the criminal. The sides are taken 
and the fight is on. The advance of the cause of 
righteousness is the thing upon which good men 
have always set their hearts. All other victories 
have their value here. If they are real, if they 
are not imaginary, they are windows through 
which we can look and behold the fresh defeat 
given to the cause of inhumanity. If we can say 
with reference to any recent struggle that the 
America that is above is the mother of us all, 
surely we can claim in a profounder sense that 
the Jerusalem that we seek to establish over all 
holds for aU men and all classes the one infinite 
good. Think of the depth and tenderness of 
Paul's figure. Motherhood is the name for the 
moral order in which we exist, for the spiritual 
fellowship to which we may rise, for the indwell- 
ing plan of God in our humanity and the energy 
of the Holy Spirit continually breaking in upon 
our being through that open way. Yes, we owe 
our existence as men, our capacity to cooperate 



306 REVELATION AND THE IDEAL 

one with another, our power to form brotherhoods 
in trade, in art, in all human enterprises and in- 
terests ; we owe all the sweeter associations, all 
the deeper memories and the whole richness and 
tenderness of life — to the motherhood of God's 
kingdom in Christ. The whole upper side of our 
homes, of our brotherhoods, of our citizenship, 
of our humanity, is the mighty birth of the Je- 
rusalem which is above. And the loneliness of 
wicked men, their secret cry for another existence, 
their longing for the days that are gone when 
existence was pure, the sorrow of those who have 
lost faith and character and hope, and who yet 
pine for an infinite good — all these are but the 
surges of the filial heart, the tidal return of in- 
stinct and feeling to the unutterable tenderness 
and love of the Divine Mother of us all. 

For the expression of the contrast between the 
two Jerusalems which he saw, Paul used a tre- 
mendous comparison. The first Hebrew had two 
sons, one by the bondwoman and one by the free. 
The actual Jerusalem with all her ignorance and 
shame is that dishonored slave, bearing children 
into bondage. The ideal Jerusalem is the free 
woman, bearing a son who is the divine promise 
of the ages. That is Paul's burning parallel from 
history. Nothing less terrible could at all serve 
the pressing and convulsive passion of his soul. 
Surely we see its application to our own national 



THE IDEAL OF THE PATBIOT 307 

condition. There is an America that resembles 
that poor slave — an America that bears chil- 
dren into the worst oppressions, an America that 
would fill the land with ignorance, distrust, in- 
finite greed, and utter anarchy ; an America that 
would end a headlong and horrible career in self- 
destruction. That is the America against which 
we must fight, not only on election day, but upon 
all days, not only with our ballots, but with our 
total Christianity. For there is another America 
that resembles the free woman — an America that 
gives the son of promise to mankind, an America 
that, united in herself, exulting in her august 
mission, inspired in the presence of her vast op- 
portunity, and devoted to the highest good of all 
within her borders, creates a new epoch in human 
history and kindles a new hope for the world. 
The whole power of Christianity, organized and 
unorganized, stands out against the nation that 
is from beneath, the nation that is in bondage and 
that bears children into bondage ; it stands forth 
in behalf of the nation that is from above, that 
is free and that is the glorious mother of us all. 
The Christian Church holds in vision two Amer- 
icas ; it sees the actual America, its sins, its crimes, 
its miseries, its profound needs, and the ideal 
America in all its purity, majesty, and power. It 
believes that the actual America is an illusion, 
the invention of our weakness and sin ; and that 



308 REVELATION AND THE IDEAL 

the ideal America is the abiding reality, the ever- 
lasting truth, God's creation wrought in light and 
beauty and instinct with undying life. That the 
one America may pass, and that the other Amer- 
ica may more and more take its vacant place ; 
that the nation of incapacity, selfishness and 
crime may go and the nation founded in faith 
and in love may come should be one great end 
of the Church's existence, one great object of 
its prayers and toils and sufferings, one of the 
strongest of its many appeals for support to 
the community in which it is established. 



XXIII 

THE IDEALIST AND THE EPHESIAN 
BEASTS 

" If after the manner of men I fought with beasts at Ephesus, what doth 
it profit me ? If the dead are not raised, let ua eat and drink, for to-mor- 
row we die." 

1 Cor. XV, 32. 

In this chapter Paul is reasoning in behalf of 
the immortality of man. His major premise is 
that the man Jesus survived death and after 
death made Himself known as a living being to 
his disciples. His conclusion from this grand 
premise is that aU men because they are men 
survive death ; the survival of the one Perfect 
Man being the assurance of the survival of the 
race of which He is the great representative. As 
in Adam aU die, so in Christ shall aU be made 
alive. 

The words of the text are an interruption of 
the main argument. The apostle has been seek- 
ing the assurance of immortality in y the typical 
life outside the great current of human experi- 
ence ; he has been resting the universal hope upon 
a mighty exceptional instance. He now descends 
into the depths of the tragic conflict of man, his 
conflict with the wild passions of his heart, in 
behalf of the Christian ideal of personal and so- 



310 BEVELATION AND THE IDEAL 

cial worth. The vision of this conflict checks for 
a moment the march of his reasoning, draws his 
eyes closer to the struggle of the Christian ideal- 
ist, compels the apostle to declare, in a metaphor 
that is a beacon-light flash in the darkness and 
wildness of the storm, the tremendous issues work- 
ing in the tragic courses of human contention for 
high ends. " If after the manner of men I fought 
with beasts at Ephesus, what doth it profit me ? 
If the dead are not raised, let us eat and drink, 
for to-morrow we die." 

Here in the main argument and in the episode 
are two distinct visions of life. There is the vision 
of the destiny of Jesus, the perfect human life, 
the vision, too, of the life that completes itself in 
the fellowship of the Lord. There is the second 
vision, the vision of life unmade and in the tre- 
mendous process of making. These two distinct 
views of life attach themselves in a different 
manner to the faith in the hereafter. 

For the favored existence immortality is but 
the extension beyond death of what is present 
here and now. To the fortunate person to-day 
immortality often seems an addition to this 
earthly life rather than something inseparable 
from its character and meaning. Such persons 
ripen toward that world as the happiness of this 
world exhausts itself. In a sweetly sensuous way 
they are apt to sing with Spenser, — 



THE IDEALIST AND EPHESIAN BEASTS 311 

" Sleepe after toyle, port after stormy seas, 

Peace after warre, death after life, does greatly please." 

The vision of life unmade and in tlie fiery 
process of making is another thing. Here we 
approach God, we approach Christ, we approach 
hope, not from without but from within. Our 
God is our light and our salvation on the black 
field of our battle for righteous manhood; our 
Christ is within, and the hope of glory lives in 
the pulse-beats of our fighting heart. As the 
bright moon rises and rides over the tides of the 
stormy sea, their calm sovereign, so over " this 
maddening maze of things" in human life, while 
"toss'd by storm and flood," there appears as 
the supreme ruler of it the splendid image of the 
infinite worth of man's soul. 

Two distinct types of human experience emerge 
here to which I beg your attention for a mo- 
ment: the highly favored type and the tragic 
type. These two experiences are often included 
as contrasts in the history of the same person. 
There is Paul in Arabia. He is there with his 
new life in an environment of peace ; he is there 
with his Christian ideal in the sunshine of happy 
solitude, with all the forces of his Christian soul 
playing freely into the perfect sympathy of the 
time and the place. Here the great tranquil soul 
of the apostle was matched with the great tran- 
quil environment. Those three years in Arabia 



312 REVELATION AND THE IDEAL 

were an idyllic experience, an idyllic memory 
forever. They were rich with the maturing love, 
the deepening insight, the unhindered growth of 
a great mind and a great character. 

If Paul had spoken, at this time, of the future 
life, he would surely have been influenced by his 
happy experience. The future world would have 
seemed the fair and mighty shadow of his hfe in 
Arabia. His happy Christian dreams would have 
reflected themselves in august forms in the mir- 
ror of eternity. The hope of future existence 
would have sprung out of the heart of his hap- 
piness ; it would have fed itself on God's present 
care of his servant's favored existence. In har- 
mony within and in harmony with the world be- 
yond him, how could he doubt that in this favor- 
ing universe he and his fellow-disciples would 
forever go on? 

Utterly without influence such a hope would 
have been to men in the welter of the stormy 
world. They are torn within and at war without ; 
in their experience sin and the sense of righteous- 
ness, shame and honor, light and darkness, joy 
and bitterness are blended in a terrible compound, 
and the hope that is the complement of the un- 
troubled soul is not for them. Their cry is, "In 
the dust I write my heart's deep languor and my 
soul's sad tears." The bright cloudless day may 
look forward to the serene starlit night ; but 



THE IDEALIST AND EPHESIAN BEASTS 313 

what are we to say of the day that has been one 
of tempest ? 

In the experience of Paul, Arabia was trans- 
formed into Ephesus. He was to fight with the 
passions in his own fiery heart, he was to con- 
tend with the passions of other men ; his fight 
was to be like the struggle of men with beasts in 
the amphitheatre. If the fight was to be in any 
sense a victory, it must be a fight with courage 
and to the end. In such an arena Paul's fighting 
arm was gaining force, his battling soul was in- 
creasing its worth. 

Suppose Paul to think of life after death under 
these conditions. What is his mood now, what 
is the ground of his hope ? His mood is that the 
fight with evil in himself and in his fellow-men 
is exhilarating, because worth is won in the fight. 
Moral worth becomes the object, the great allur- 
ing object of his campaign against sin, moral 
worth for his own spirit, moral worth for all 
men, the kingdom of moral worth established in 
the heart of the Roman Empire. For this infinite 
good he will fight and suif er to the end ; for it he 
wiU live till the fighting arm is paralyzed in death. 

Here let us suppose that he raises the ques- 
tion. Does death end all? It cannot be, he 
answers. That would mean that honor is not of 
infinite worth, that righteousness is not a univer- 
sal and endless value, that love is not of eternal 



314 REVELATION AND THE IDEAL 

consequence to the Eternal God. It cannot be 
that death ends all, because if that were true we 
should have nothing of infinite moment to fight 
for ; aU our high passion and contention for moral 
worth would be vain. In that case the universe 
would be against us, our kingdom of the ideal 
would be a kingdom of delusion, our warfare for 
the city of God would be rewarded with scorn. 
The stars in their courses would mock our esti- 
mates of worth, our causes, our heroism, and our 
hope. If the universe refuses to support us when 
we are struggling at our own cost for the high- 
est, we conclude that our struggle is foolishness. 
Thus out of the heart of the tragedy of existence, 
up from the battle-fields of souls as they contend 
in their sorrow with these passions that are like 
wild beasts in behalf of the moral meaning of 
existence, comes the great conviction that man 
is forever. Paul's confidence in the truth of his 
faith rests upon the insight that without faith in 
the endless life his moral world would go to 
wreck. Our mightiest struggle, — 

" What is it all, if we all of us end but in being our own 

corpse coffins at last, 
Swallow'd in Vastness, lost in Silence, drown'd in the 

deeps of a meaningless Past ? 
What but a murmur of gnats in the gloom, or a moment's 

anger of bees in their hive ? 

let it be ! for I loved him a: 

the dead are not dead but alive ! 



TBE IDEALIST AND EPHESIAN BEASTS 315 

The Christian hope of life after death ceases 
to be a mere lovely dream when we discover its 
relation to the tragedy of human history. Men 
begin to listen when we tell them that the one 
thing worth fighting for is moral integrity. All 
woes, all fierce fortune, all bitter, untimely be- 
reavements, all the contradictions of this confused 
world, where friends are mistaken for foes, may 
be accepted with the true soldier's serene courage 
while we believe that in the gTeat campaign 
against wrong moral worth is being won, that 
the kingdom of moral values is establishing itself 
in the earth. The war for the Union is an illum- 
inating example. It was a tragedy. Neither side 
was wholly right, nor wholly wrong ; both sides 
were partially right and wrong. Through the 
awful conflict souls went home to God purified 
by death accepted for what they believed to be 
right ; souls returned to civic life lifted in honor. 
Lee in defeat and Grant in victory typify a com- 
mon defeat and a common victory. When the 
armies of the North and the South are mustered 
in the fields of the Eternal, the great issue of 
the tragic process will be seen to be brave men 
redeemed by the worth they won in the tragedy 
of their time. 

Here we come upon two different ways of es- 
timating the moral life of human beings. There 
is the test of achievement ; there is the test of 



316 REVELATION AND THE IDEAL 

struggle. In which environment is Paul the 
greater character, in Arabia or fighting with 
beasts at Ephesus? It is clear that the ideal 
character wiU compass in struggle the perfect 
achievement. Jesus comes up out of the Jordan 
to hear as it were the voice of God assuring him, 
" Thou art my beloved Son." There environment 
is wrought into the harmony of the infinite sym- 
pathy and in fuU accord with that environment 
is the soul of Jesus. Later we find Jesus led into 
the wilderness to be tempted of the Devil. He is 
there alone, and again, like his apostle, he was 
with the wild beasts. Only after his victory was 
won did the angels come and minister to him. 
He was tempted in all points as we are, yet was 
he without sin. The environment was wrought 
into diabolic antipathy, and yet the soul of the 
Lord remained in its integrity. Which is the 
greater Master, Jesus in his integrity in the en- 
vironment of absolute sympathy or Jesus in his 
integrity in the environment of uttermost an- 
tipathy ? In each instance the integrity is perfect, 
but in the one environment Jesus is supported, 
while in the other he is assailed ; and Jesus right- 
eous under assault is greater than Jesus righteous 
unassailed. The achievement is greatened out of 
the heart of the difficulty that has been overcome. 
Even in Jesus, who alone unites the perfect en- 
deavor and the perfect achievement, we see that 



TBE IDEALIST AND EPHESIAN BEASTS 317 

the test of achievement by itself is insufficient ; 
we must measure achievement against the sym- 
pathy or the hostility of the environment in or- 
der to attain a just judgment upon character. 

Daniel Webster, after his seventh of March 
speech in 1850, divided the opinion of the North ; 
especially did he divide the opinion of Massachu- 
setts. Emerson and Whittier, who had hitherto 
followed him in admiration, revolted in hatred 
and disgust. Whittier wrote his " Ichabod," and 
Emerson lost no chance to scale down the dimen- 
sions of his former hero, to expose his weaknesses, 
to assail his character. The method of judgment 
and warfare is illuminating. Two men of great 
elevation of spirit and purity of life combine in 
an attack upon one who was fighting with beasts 
at Ephesus. Theii: test of moral greatness was 
achievement ; they took no note of the environ- 
ment that made the ideal achievement which they 
demanded of Webster impossible. Their judg- 
ment was essentially unjust ; it has been set aside 
by another generation of judges. 

Emerson and Whittier lived high and serene 
lives in a sheltered environment. They served 
their generation as the battleship anchored in 
the harbor for the training of naval cadets serves 
compared with the battleship on the high seas in 
the thunder of war. Whittier and Emerson are 
much cleaner and finer than Webster ; but are 



318 REVELATION AND THE IDEAL 

they on that account morally greater than he ? 
If they had gone where he went, if they had met 
what he met, suffered what he suffered, and 
achieved what he achieved, would they have ap- 
peared as little broken, as heroic as he ? 

The saint is usually a product of the sympa- 
thetic environment. We are thankful for his 
achievement, but we must deduct something from 
it because of favoring circumstances. Whittier 
repented of " Ichabod " ; he substituted, " The 
Lost Occasion," and elsewhere he adds his sanc- 
tion to the distinction I am now making : — 

" I who hear with secret shame 
Praise that paineth more than hlame. 
Rich alone in favors lent, 
Virtuous by accident, 
Doubtful where I fain would rest, 
Frailest where I seem the best, 
Only strong for lack of test." 

Take into account noble inheritance, wise and 
impressive early training, the sheltered and sym- 
pathetic environment, and then judge under what 
obligations the great character stands. We thank 
God for him, but we do not forget the words of 
Jesus, " To whom much is given, of him much 
will be required." 

Consider the value of the struggle among the 
Ephesian beasts. There is the struggle for honor 
where it is a hindrance to success ; for purity 
where it does not count in the pursuit of the 



1 



THE IDEALIST AND EPHESIAN BEASTS 319 

goal ; for truth where lying is regarded as part 
of the game ; for elevation of mind where mean- 
ness is no handicap ; for unselfishness where bru- 
tality is justified ; for pity where pity is mocked ; 
for Christ where Christ is crucified afresh ; for 
God where his name is heard only in blasphemy. 
Measure the distance made where the way is a 
via mala, a via dolorosa ; where the path is 
through treachery, brutality, outrage, and shame. 
Estimate the day's run of your ship against wind 
and wave and tide ; take into account the tragic 
forces in life. Consider the number, intensity, 
and malignity of the powers that oppose charac- 
ter, and then note the moral grandeur of the 
struggle even when it is little more than an un- 
availing protest against the sovereignty of the 
beast. The battleship Oregon excited the admi- 
ration of the world by its splendid voyage round 
Cape Horn, through the vast Pacific to Manila 
and back again in time to arrest the flying fleet 
of Cervera with the thunder of its guns. Con- 
sider the ship in which Magellan made the same 
voyage. How much longer he took, how much 
less certain his progress, and he went only one 
way. Yes. But think of his poor boat, his mean 
equipment, his uncharted course, his starving 
crew, his untold sufferings, his audacious daring. 
When achievements are scaled down and up, 
according as environments are sympathetic or 



320 REVELATION AND THE IDEAL 

hostile, the voyage of the Oregon is hardly a cir- 
cumstance compared with the mighty victorious 
circumnavigation of the globe by Magellan. He 

" was the first that ever burst 
Into that silent sea." 

Take the world as it is, take human beings in 
this world as they are, and you will find, I think, 
an* infinite value. Conscience is alive even when 
incompetent; protest against sin goes on when 
unavailing ; struggle to be level with some moral 
standard exists in the great heart of mankind; 
regret and longing die out only in the souls of 
the few. In the thoroughfares of trade, in the 
grinding toil and poverty of the world, in the 
tragedies of lust and greed and cruelty and 
death, in the vast tides of contradiction and woe 
that sweep over the populations of the earth, 
you find struggle after one standard or another, 
endeavor to keep within sight of this ideal and 
that, prayers often wrought into sobs that exist- 
ence may not come altogether to dust and ashes. 
Listen to the " still sad music of humanity " ; 
there is protest in it, struggle, pathos, longing, 
hope, and often desperate denial of the sovereignty 
of the beast whose fang is near the centre of life. 
Think of God as He surveys his world, and how 
this mood of protest and struggle appears to Him. 
Is not this one great aspect of the moral world 



THE IDEALIST AND EPEESIAN BEASTS 321 

of man? Is not this one mighty assurance that 
man, while of the earth earthy, is also the child 
of Eternity? Can we not hear the great faith 
coming up from the depths, " as we have borne 
the image of the earthy we shall also bear the 
image of the heavenly" ? Can we not say of our 
ideas of the worth of man what Emerson wrote 
of our chief spiritual possessions ? — 

" Out from the heart of nature rolled 
The burdens of the Bible old ; 
The litanies of nations came 
With the volcano's tongue of flame ; 
Up from the burning core below, — 
The canticles of love and woe." 

Not alone from the saint in his cell and in his 
rapt devotion, but also from the countless multi- 
tudes of lives stained with the mud and battered 
with the storms of this wild world comes the 
amazing witness to the worth of the human soul. 
Indeed, our faith in the hereafter is always surer 
when it is seen to rest not only upon the testimony 
of exceptional lives in exceptional circumstances, 
but also when it is uttered in the vast, confused, 
and desperate struggle of the multitudes that are 
caught in the tragedy of the world. 

I recall a night spent at the foot of Mount Car- 
mel on the shore of the Mediterranean. At mid- 
night I was awakened by the thunder of the sea 
upon the sand. It seemed to me as if the whole 



322 REVELATION AND THE IDEAL 

two thousand miles of the Mediterranean were 
breaking in tremendous billows upon the beach. 
Next morning when I arose the sea was stiU. As 
I walked along the shore I noticed the sand white 
and fine, the pebbles smooth and beautiful. The 
sand and the pebbles had won their character 
not alone from that storm, but from countless 
other storms. Then I understood what the psalm- 
ist meant when he cried, " All thy waves and thy 
billows are gone over me." Perhaps he had lis- 
tened to the mighty forerunners of the storm to 
which I had listened ; perhaps in the sand and 
the stones, refined and polished under the pound- 
ing and grinding of the terrible sea, he beheld 
an image of the wild tragic tides of the world 
and their power to create values for eternity 
even when they seem to overwhelm and crush 
the souls of men. 

This world is not an organism for torture, but 
for the manufacture of character ; for the pro- 
duction of the instincts, capacities, and longings 
out of which great character comes. The agony 
is there ; it is there in contradiction, heartbreak, 
blackness of darkness, death ; but the issue is 
the morning, the calm light, the still sea, and 
the purified heart of man. Who are these and 
whence came they ? These are they that came out 
of the great tribulation ; they were made meet 
for the inheritance of the saints in light by the 



THE IDEALIST AND EPHESIAN BEASTS 323 

tragic beauty of the world. Widen your vision 
of this enterprise of the Holy Ghost till you in- 
clude all peoples, all ages, all types of human 
experience ; till the race of man in historic and 
prehistoric time is within the compass of your 
intelligence. The earth will then seem to you 
God's great gymnasium for the creation of moral 
capacities and values in the souls of men ; and 
eternity will stand forth as another, similar, 
grander process working for the same end. Bliss 
and woe are here ; bliss and woe are beyond, the 
indispensable servants of enlightenment and 
worth. Open your heart to-day to some of the 
things that are going on under God's government 
every moment ; pain and sorrow issue in death in 
one unending process : — 

" The souls did from their bodies fly, — 
They fled to bliss or woe ; 
And every soul it passed me by, 
Like the whizz of my crossbow." 

This is what you hear, and on a scale too vast 
for words. What shall we do with it ? Turn it 
into a guide down into the depths ;* con vert it into 
eyes wherewith we may see and understand some- 
thing of the dark and terrible process that issues 
in moral worth, in the capacity for moral worth. 
This is the world as tragedy; this tragedy cre- 
ates values in souls for time and for eternity. 
In the Apostles' Creed we read of Jesus, " He 



324 REVELATION AND THE IDEAL 

descended into hell," descendit ad inferno ; no 
words could more fittingly symbolize the com- 
prehensiveness of the Lord's understanding heart. 
While on the earth He descended into the dark- 
est human lives till He came to the light that is 
older than darkness. The tragedy in the lives of 
publicans and harlots was woe to Him, but it was 
a woe under the sovereignty of his Father. He 
beheld the rich young ruler who had kept all the 
commandments from his youth, and He loved 
him; He said with a profounder accent of sym- 
pathy to a penitent woman, " Go into peace.'* 
Jesus looked upon a world in wreck, and aside 
from complaisant hypocrites He turned eyes of 
pity and hope upon every sort of sinful man and 
woman. In the depths of sin He saw the suffer- 
ing and the ineffectual struggle to be free. His 
soul read the divine in man's world as that world 
lay in wickedness ; He entertained the vision of 
man's infinite worth to God, as that vision came 
up from the abysses of abused love and contra- 
dicted hope ; and that insight drawn from the 
midnight of the life of our kind He glorifies in 
the message that He brings straight from his 
Father ; that insight He sanctions by his sublime 
life ; that insight He attests by his victory over 
death. 



XXIV 

PERSONALITY AND THE IDEAL GRACE 

" That as Peter came by, at the least his shadow might overshadow 
some one of them. 

Acts V, 15. 

Knowledge, power, personality ; these are the 
deepest sources of man's influence over man. 
Ideas count for much, true ideas; power — that 
is, ideas filled with vitality and purpose — 
counts for more; personality, the central and 
often unconscious reality of the spirit, counts 
most in the influence of noble human beings 
upon one another. We thank the man who gives 
us the hght of thought, but we are not satisfied 
with this gift. We are grateful to the leader who 
puts his character into his teaching and yet we 
cry out for something more. We rejoice in the 
teacher and inspirer whose soul, through the 
whole atmosphere and silence of life, wields a 
heavenly influence upon our souls. We look at 
some great planet shining out of the deepening 
dusk of evening ; we behold there light, power, 
beauty ; we consider some great prophet of the 
Christian faith, and we find in him ideas, ideas in 
action, and beyond them the beauty of a tender 
and lofty soul. 



326 REVELATION AND THE IDEAL 

Such a soul was Peter. We seek in vain either 
in his teaching or in his character for the source 
of his best influence. He had rich sympathies ; 
he was endowed with the attractive grace of the 
humanities ; there was within him a soul of honor 
and of tenderness that moved men and helped 
them. They longed to be where he was ; to forget 
themselves in the play of his personality ; to feel 
upon them the healing shadow of his soul. 

1. Here I think we have the revelation of a 
law in the life of man, in the character of Christ, 
in the nature of God ; the last and finest thing 
in the disciple, in the Master, an^ in our Father 
in heaven is the ideal grace. 

For this ideal grace we look in our heroes, 
France has recently given a national illustration 
of this contention. Napoleon has lost the supreme 
place in the imagination of Frenchmen ; a scien- 
tist who lived to heal human diseases and mitigate 
human woes took the warrior's vacant throne. 
There is intellect in Napoleon, there is power in 
him ; but there is no grace of spirit. We read 
our national history by this sovereign instinct. 
Alexander Hamilton was a greater intellect 
than Abraham Lincoln ; Daniel Webster was a 
mightier intelligence. In both these statesmen 
there is more light and more might than in Lin- 
coln ; but they lack the crowning grace, the ideal 
spirit. We compare Martin Luther and John 



I 



PERSONALITY AND THE IDEAL GRACE 327 

Calvin. Calvin is the greater scholar, the greater 
thinker ; Luther is something higher than the 
scholar, something finer than the thinker ; he is 
a vast, heroic, tender, and loving human being. 
Plato tells us that this was the final charm of 
his master. Other men might be compared with 
Socrates as a speaker, as a teacher; in many- 
other characteristics parallels to him might be 
found among his contemporaries and among the 
men in earlier ages ; but in one respect he was 
unique ; in his total personality he was absolutely 
unlike any other Greek that ever lived. 

When we look at the record of the mind and 
character and spirit of Jesus in the Gospels, we 
recognize this law of gradation of which I am 
speaking. When we have risen to the level where 
mind is measured not by the number of its words, 
nor by the elaboration of its thoughts, but by the 
originality, the depth and the truth of its insights, 
we acknowledge at once the supremacy of the 
mind of Christ. Still we see in Him something 
higher than intellect ; we note in Him power. 
He moved his age ; He moved Europe in the age 
following his own ; He has moved the world ; He 
is moving it to-day as He has never done in any- 
previous time. But power is not the final analysis 
of the Master ; character, that is, the idea, vital 
and true in action, does not wholly account for 
Him. There is a benignity of soul, a magnanim- 



328 REVELATION AND THE IDEAL 

ity of heart, an ideal grace of spirit that is his 
ultimate influence. It was not on account of his 
mind that distracted mothers came to Him on be- 
half of their children ; it was not because of the 
strength and authority of his character that the 
wretched and sinful sought Him ; it was because 
of the integrity and the beauty of his soul. The 
shadow of his heart is the sanctuary of history. 
From the highest in Christ we look upon the 
highest in our faith about God. He knows all 
things ; He can do all things ; but omniscience and 
omnipotence do not express the highest in the 
Christian idea of God. He is our Father in 
heaven ; he is the Eternal Lover of men ; He is 
the perfect soul, the infinite ideal tenderness and 
compassion. " Like as a father pitieth his chil- 
dren so the Lord pitieth them that fear Him. As 
far as the east is from the west so far hath he 
removed our transgressions from us. He remem- 
bereth that we are dust." So the Old Testament 
speaks. In the New Testament He is the God 
of all comfort, the Father of all mercies, the 
Father of lights from whom cometh down every 
good and perfect gift, who is without variable- 
ness or the shadow which is cast by turning; 
He is the Father who makes his sun shine on 
the evil and the good and his rain fall on the 
just and the unjust ; He is the Father in the great 
parable who goes out to meet his lost son, who 



PERSONALITY AND THE IDEAL GRACE 329 

will not allow the poor boy in the bitterness of 
shame to complete his confession, who overwhelms 
him with an unbounded and joyous welcome. The 
God and Father of Jesus Christ is our God ; and in 
Him the sovereign reality is infinite ideal grace. 
This is what we mean by the secret place of the 
Most High, by the Shadow of the Almighty. 

2. This quality that is highest in the heroes of 
the race, that is supreme in our Lord, that is 
sovereign in God, more than any other admits 
of universality. Great intellect is confined to a 
few; transcendent energy cannot become the 
possession of the many ; but truth and beauty of 
soul are open to all. Nothing is needed for this 
result but good will, good will under all circum- 
stances, good will from the beginning of existence 
to its close. The endowment of humanity, kind- 
ness, sympathy, generous feeling, divine regard, 
is the original equipment of all except degen- 
erates. This endowment does not remain in its 
pure estate unless guarded ; it does not grow 
without care ; it is in a multitude of cases swiftly 
debased by the wicked custom of the world. 

One of the tragic things in the world's history 
is the loss in children of worth and tenderness 
of heart. The old cunning fox of the social order 
into which the children come takes them into 
his school. He equips them with indifference, 
vanity, smart cruelty of speech, selfishness, hard- 



330 BEVELATION AND THE IDEAL 

ness of heart, instead of the royal attributes with 
which their Maker endowed them, — sensitive- 
ness, delicacy, honor, wonderful sympathy. When 
the social fox gets done with our boys and girls, 
only the capacity is left for the recovery of the 
original endowment. 

Another aspect of the tragedy of life is seen in 
the bereavements of youth. Youth and the birth 
of ideality are terms that mean about the same 
thing. There is in the soul of every normal young 
man the image of a knight ; there is in the heart 
of every sound young woman the reflection of 
ideal grace. Glorious as sunrise are these dawn- 
ings of the ideal in the hearts of young men and 
young women ; these young souls thus visited by 
the day-spring from on high are in the kingdom 
of God. They have been carried thither on the 
tides of divine instinct. What may the world not 
expect from the coming generation thus dowered? 
Alas ! You are looking at the orchard in May ; 
you are enchanted with the beauty of the blos- 
soms ; you forget that you behold promise and not 
fulfillment. Look again after the untimely frost 
has passed its icy hand over those trees. No har- 
vest can now come from those blasted limbs; 
you wait in hope and in fear for the experiment 
of another generation. 

So it is with our youth. They neglect the gift 
of God within them ; they expose to the un- 



PERSONALITY AND THE IDEAL GBACE 331 

friendly world the tender wealth of their nature ; 
they take no thought for the preservation of that 
interior beauty which is the soul of their exist- 
ence; and instead of an army of radiant young 
men and women we see those, who should be vic- 
torious soldiers of the ideal, marching in the faded 
and tattered uniforms of the forlorn regiments that 
have gone before them on the dusty way to defeat. 
The horror of a disease like smallpox is that it 
not only puts life in peril, but destroys forever 
the fresh and fair complexion of youth. Nothing 
can recover that loss ; and this conviction strength- 
ens our determination to fight in every way the 
terrible plague. Nothing can bring back the May 
morning of the soul, the tender beauty of early 
feeling, the freshness of the earnest and unstained 
heart ; when that is lost, it is lost forever. The 
sacrifice through frivolousness, worldliness, self- 
indulgence, careless and unconscientious living, 
of the bloom of the spirit in youth is a wanton 
sacrifice ; it should not be. Look at the street- 
lamp in the summer evening ; look at the ground 
about it white with dead moths ; look at a thou- 
sand other moths heedless of the dead flying 
fiercely to the same fate. When will youth awake 
to its greatness ? when will it seek light where the 
light is not fatal fire ; when will it reverence its 
higher nature and secure for itself and the world 
the ideal grace of the soul ? 



332 REVELATION AND THE IDEAL 

This mournful sacrifice in no way alters the 
fact that the grace of the spirit is the universal 
possibility. When Jesus took possession of the 
lives of his apostles, even he could not make all 
of them great men. Peter, James, and John are 
the only significant names among the twelve ; 
Paul is the only great addition to these three. 
What of the others? They became exalted hu- 
man beings and beat the music of the Lord into 
ten thousand hearts by the honor and the kind- 
ness of their spirit. When Christianity takes pos- 
session of any community to-day, this is the result. 
The great broad phenomenon is the universal ex- 
altation of spirit. Men and women have become 
new in the fineness and worth of their nature. 
This is the great argument for religion ; it is the 
grace that purifies, exalts, and consecrates to the 
Highest the life of man. When the genuine re- 
vival comes, it manifests its influence in this way ; 
it issues in a nobler type of thinking and feeling, 
in a higher sense of honor, in a deeper rever- 
ence, in a steadier conscientiousness, in a richer 
and finer soul. God has his special gifts for men 
of genius as He has for the great mountains ; 
and as the great mountains gather out of heaven 
upon themselves cloud and storm and send them 
down in torrent and stream to make and to swell 
the rivers that carry the grace of the heights 
through the land, so men of genius gain from the 



PERSONALITY AND THE IDEAL GRACE 333 

Infinite insights, inspirations, comforts, and re- 
freshings that go forth to all the world. Again, 
our Maker bestows the universal gifts, as the 
broad landscape lies open to the summer sun and 
the summer shower, as this visitation from above 
is immediate and universal, so upon the souls of 
all men everywhere the Eternal Spirit descends 
in the power that creates the great human capac- 
ity for truth and sympathy. To speak the truth 
and to speak it in love is the vocation of man ; 
to deal justly, love kindness, and walk humbly 
with God is within the capacity of every human 
being; to survey life with sympathy, to judge 
men considerately, to act faithfully, to serve 
gladly, to take one's share in sacrifice cheerfully, 
to live one's life with earnestness, tenderness, 
and hope, is the universal possibility. In the great 
oratorio of the " Messiah," which is the mightier, 
the solo or the chorus ? The solo is mighty, " Com- 
fort ye, comfort ye my people, saith your God ; 
speak ye comfortably to Jerusalem and cry unto 
her that her warfare is accomplished, that her in- 
iquity is pardoned, that she hath received of the 
Lord's hand double for all her sins." The solo is 
mighty, but how much mightier is the chorus, 
"The Lord God omnipotent reigneth, and he 
shall reign forever and ever. King of Kings and 
Lord of Lords." As the solo is to the chorus, 
so is the special gift of genius to the universal 



334 REVELATION AND THE IDEAL 

human capacity. The whole human being, the 
entire community of human beings in the exercise 
of the universal gift, is the greatest thing in the 
world. 

3. As the grace of the spirit is the widest ca- 
pacity, so is it the largest need. Great intellect 
and great authority are instrumental ; we need 
men of genius and men of unique character for 
the service of the people ; the exaltation of the 
life of the common people is the sovereign end. 
How great we should be as a nation if justice 
were universal, if kindness were supreme in every 
heart within our borders, if high purpose upheld 
every will, if reverence dwelt in every soul, if 
sympathy went forth like sunbeams from every 
life. How many cry out because there exists no 
justice, no consideration for them ; how many are 
miserable because they are compelled to live in 
an atmosphere of unkindness ; how many are weak 
because they are surrounded by a multitude of 
wayward wills that know nothing of moral pur- 
pose ; how many are cheap because the awe that 
lofty companions inspire never visits them; how 
many find their pilgrimage to be in the Valley 
of Weeping because the sunlight of a great sym- 
pathy never greets and cheers them. 

-The common virtues are sadly uncommon. 
The race of men would pass, like the planet at 
sunrise, from night to day, if only men would be 



PERSONALITY AND THE IDEAL GRACE 335 

humane to one another. " Man's inhumanity to 
man makes countless thousands mourn." The 
cry is not for the greatness in intellect or in char- 
acter that is impossible to all except the few ; it 
is for the exercise of the universal capacity. Give 
us truth without lies; give us honesty without 
scorn ; give us even-handed justice, generous- 
hearted kindness ; exalt us with reverence ; shame 
us with mercy ; delight us with honor ; greaten 
our vitality with sympathy ; show us the way of 
the Lord who went about doing good, to whom it 
was more blessed to give than to receive, who, 
although He was rich, for our sakes became poor 
that we through his poverty might become rich. 
When you hear the statement that God became 
incarnate in Jesu^ Christ, you listen as to some- 
thing that concerns theologians and learned men, 
to something that does not concern you. State 
the central fact of your faith in all simplicity 
and then judge. What does the incarnation of 
God in Jesus Christ mean? It means that the 
mind of God was sovereign in the mind of Jesus, 
the heart of God regnant in the heart of Jesus, 
the spirit of God all-controlling in the soul of the 
Lord. There is the unique presence and domina- 
tion of God in Christ ; but this unique dominance 
becomes the universal call and privilege. The 
kingdom of God is for all; the kingdom of God 
is within you ; the kingdom of God is his control 



336 REVELATION AND THE IDEAL 

of man in the totality of his being. " I am the 
light of the world," the Master says, speaking 
of Himself; "Ye are the light of the world," 
the same Master says, speaking to his disciples. 
The common physical needs, how simple they 
are and how great, the need of air and sunshine 
and food and clothing and home. These are the 
primary necessities, and how abundant and pre- 
cious the supply. The infinite air, the boundless 
sunshine, the seed-time and harvest that do not 
fail, the clothing, the shelter and the comfort 
of home, how they carry in their hands the uni- 
versal response to the universal need. The com- 
mon spiritual needs, how few they are and how 
easily they might be provided. The atmosphere 
of friendship, the sunshine of kindness, the habit 
of reverence, the word of God from a brother's 
heart without which man cannot live, the protec- 
tion of honor, the inspiration of justice, the com- 
fort of a noble compassion; these are notes 
of the immortal hunger of our nature, and to 
these necessities every man is so made that he 
may be a great minister. The violin is one of the 
simplest of musical instruments and one of the 
widest in scope ; it is a keen disappointment when 
you look upon a violin with no music in it. It is 
a bitter disappointment that so many human 
souls, so many disciples of Christ, have no melody, 
no solace in them for the universal heart. 



PERSONALITY AND THE IDEAL GRACE 337 

One of our number has been suddenly taken 
from us who was never without this gift and who 
lived his rarely beautiful life in the constant ex- 
ercise of it.i He was not slothful in business ; he 
was also fervent in spirit. He took up his share 
of the burden of giving laid down by his honored 
father, and he bore it with steadfast step and the 
sense of privilege to the end. He carried in aU 
the instincts and forces of his nature the human- 
ity of business, the obligation of wealth, the 
spirit of service, the refinements of the Christian 
heart, and notwithstanding his reserve the genius 
of friendship, and in spite of his humility, the 
sense of the Eternal. His death in his prime is 
a calamity not only to his family but also to this 
church of his fathers, to the entire community, 
and to all the causes that good men carry in 
their heart. To those who knew him even at a 
distance and but slightly, he embodied signal re- 
finement and evident honor ; to those who knew 
him intimately and who saw him in one after 
another of the finer and more serious experiences 
of his life, the image that alone is adequate for 
the expression of their admiration and love is 
given in the words spoken of Stephen as he stood 
before the Council, — they " saw his face as it 
had been the face of an angel." 

He has joined the great company of pure 

i Wolcott Howe Johnson. 



338 REVELATION AND THE IDEAL 

spirits that have gone to God from this church. 
Our first feeling is of loss and the paralysis that 
comes with it ; our second feeling is that we have 
not lost them; their character is part of our 
strength; their presence with us is one of the 
certainties of our faith and we address them in 
gratitude and hope, — 

Ye, like angels, appear 

Radiant with ardor divine! 

Ye alight in our van; at your voice 

Panic, despair, flee away. 

Ye move through the ranks, recall 

The stragglers, refresh the outworn, 

Praise, reinspire the brave! 

Order, courage, return. 

Eyes rekindling, and prayers, 

Follow your steps as you go. 

Ye fill up the gaps in our files. 

Strengthen the wavering line, 

Stablish, continue our march, 

On, to the bound of the waste, 

On, to the city of God. 



XXV 

THE REDEMPTIVE IDEAL 

And it came to pass, as he sat at meat in the house, behold, many pub- 
and sinners came and sat down with Jesus and his disciples." 

Matt. IX, 10. 

The perfect religion, according to a great Ger- 
man poet, must blend in its spirit three rever- 
ences : there must be reverence for what is above 
the worshiper, there must be reverence for 
what is on the moral level of the worshiper, and 
there must be reverence for what is beneath him. 
This great insight goes to the very heart of reli- 
gion, and it is verified abundantly and beauti- 
fully by our Christian faith. We look up to the 
Lord Jesus, to the untraveled heights of his moral 
greatness ; we look up to the God and Father of 
Jesus, to his infinite compassion, to his eternal 
love ; we look round us upon the men and women 
occupying the same moral level with ourselves 
and we revere the great human nature that we 
wear ; we look beneath us into the regions of sin, 
shame, and woe, and we note there, with awe, the 
possibility of climbing from the lowest depths to 
the utmost heights, and in that amazing possibil- 
ity we behold the presence of God. Christianity 
unveils to us the heights: it reveals to us the 



340 REVELATION AND THE IDEAL 

great tableland where normal men and women 
live; it uncovers the depths, and in each way 
it brings us a new and tremendous sense of 
God. 

The redemptive ideal is the last and the most 
beautiful motive in the Gospel of Jesus. In a true 
sense we have all gone astray from the right way 
and we need to be recovered. This ideal of recovery 
of the lost is set forth by our Lord with the ut- 
most tenderness, the utmost beauty and power, 
in his three parables of the lost sheep, the lost 
coin, and the lost son. The sheep is not in the 
fold, it is in a strange environment, it is exposed 
to fatal danger, it must be sought till it is found 
and brought back ; the coin is not out of existence, 
but it is lost to the uses of the household and the 
house must be swept diligently till that piece of 
money is found and once more put to the high 
uses of family life ; the son is in the far country 
away from the true sphere of his being, and the 
father, with his great passion of fatherly love, must 
wait and must believe that his fatherly heart and 
home have power over the filial soul of the lost 
boy to bring him to himself and to bring him 
back. There is nothing in the teaching of the 
world comparable to that. Here is a purpose that 
admits of no eternal waste in the universe, a pro- 
gramme that sees no impossibilities before it, that 
seeks to reconcile the impure with the pure, a 



THE REDEMPTIVE IDEAL 341 

humanity damaged in the tragic processes of sin 
with the perfect character of God. 

What an amazing hold the redemptive ideal of 
Christianity has taken upon the world. What 
moral hope it has created in the heart of multi- 
tudes of men who had long abandoned all expec- 
tation of good for themselves. Not only has it 
created hope among outcasts ; it has sustained 
men face to face with their highest ideals. For 
what saith the idealist when he is genuine? 
" Woe is me, for I am undone ; I am a man of 
unclean lips, and I live among a people of un- 
clean lips, and mine eyes have seen God the Lord 
of Hosts." Let any man have that vision and 
read his life in the light of it, and we shall find 
that the first note in his experience is despair. 
"Depart from me, for I am a sinful man, O 
Lord" ; that is the cry of another despairing ideal- 
ist. It is the shallowness of the world that ac- 
counts for the absence in it of the sense of sin ; 
it is man's moral triviality that makes him con- 
tent with his goodness. 

We have in the text a simple, natural and an 
impressive presentation of the influence of the 
redemptive ideal of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. 
Jesus gives a banquet and invites publicans and 
sinners to eat with Him. Let us see if we can 
discern the influence at work here and the two 
chief spheres of experience in which it moves. 



342 REVELATION AND THE IDEAL 

1. We find here the great principle of the 
possibility of fellowship between the holy and the 
sinful. Look at that table ; look at the host and 
his guests. Could there be a greater contrast be- 
tween men than there is between the soul of the 
Lord and the souls of those publicans and sin- 
ners? Yet there is genuine fellowship between 
them. For a few great hours they are living in 
the Lord's thought of them, they are rejoicing in 
his divine regard for them ; they are oblivious 
of the insignificance of their careers because of 
his purpose concerning them. When the festivi- 
ties are over and they go away, they are still 
haunted by his thought, pursued by his love, held 
by his purpose ; they are in fellowship with Him 
and they can never be again the men they have 
been. 

We find analogies to all this in our own lives. 
A great and noble father tries to get his boy to 
live in his fatherly thought and love and pur- 
pose for his son. Doubt not that if this is your 
character as a parent, these thoughts and affec- 
tions and purposes influence your children more 
than they dare confess to you, more than they 
know themselves, and when you have done your 
work and gone your way, your thought for them 
will be part of the saving grace of their lives. 

Why is it that we honor a great teacher as 
we do? He teaches grammar, rhetoric, mathe- 



THE REDEMPTIVE IDEAL 343 

matics, science, and philosopliy . Is that all ? That 
is the least part of it. He has a great thought 
concerning the lives in his care, he has a great 
and noble mind for them and he calls them up 
into it ; and when they look back across the years 
to his influence over them, they say, " This was 
what he did for us ; he gave us concerning our- 
selves his outlook upon life, his interpretation of 
man's being, and man's universe." 

What does Christian faith mean for the young- 
est and the oldest but the act of climbing up in- 
to the thought and love and purpose of the Lord 
toward man? This act brings us to abandon our 
own poor thought, our barren affection, our 
feeble purpose ; it leads us to take our exist- 
ence through Christ and in fellowship with Him. 
It is misery for your boy or girl to be alone ; it 
is death for that boy or girl to contract an evil 
fellowship ; it is redemptive grace to enter fellow- 
ship after fellowship that ends in fellowship with 
the Lord. 

2. Observe that this principle of fellowship 
works through the festive side of life. As a 
teacher of religion, as a preacher of the Gospel, 
I have observed with sorrow that while men are 
ready to come to God for peace when they, are 
troubled, to seek the vision of the spiritual world 
when the present is going to wreck, to be anxious 
for consolation when they are smitten with be- 



344 REVELATION AND THE IDEAL ' 

reavemeut, to cry out for God when existence 
moves into gloom, they are apt to think they can 
get on without God in the festive side of life. 
That is one of the gravest of all human errors. 
We must bring health, gladness, love, marriage, 
parenthood, childhood, all the cheerful ways of 
men, all the mirth, all the festivity, all high 
achievement, all life's power and glory, into the 
presence of the Lord to be exalted, chastened, 
transfigured in his light. It is hardly fair to take 
the festive side of life for selfish ends, and to come 
meanly to God for help to bear the other side. 
Besides, think what we miss in this way. The 
Gospel is the great transfigurer and perfecter of 
joy; do not doubt it. It is the great redemptive 
influence for the brightness of life. Your picture 
is not complete, though painted by a Raphael or 
a Rembrandt, till the light glorifies it and gives 
it spirit. Eating and drinking and talk with one's 
friends, mirth, and the whole joyous side of exist- 
ence divorced from the fellowship of Jesus, are 
infinitely beneath what they may be. All the 
beauty of the human world is consummated in the 
beauty of the Lord our God. 

One of the great problems of young people who 
are serious, who count themselves Christians, con- 
cerns the question what amusements to accept 
and what to reject, what to see and what to re- 
fuse to see, what books to read and what not to 



THE REDEMPTIVE IDEAL 345 

read. You may read anything, you may see any- 
thing in all the world though it were black as 
hell, if your purpose in so doing can be approved 
by the Lord Jesus. A true disciple of the Lord 
will submit to no experience in which he cannot 
invite as his guest the Master of the Christian 
world. Do not dream that you are thus invoking 
the spirit of gloom ; you are inviting the Judge 
of joy, the true Critic of gladness, the Perfecter 
of the mirth of the world. 

I love to think of that banquet given by the 
Lord, and his guests, those publicans and sinners 
eating and drinking and talking together, and 
the spirit of the Lord controlling and transform- 
ing the animalism which was the foundation of 
their being as it is the foundation of ours ; that 
is the salvation man needs ; nothing less, nothing 
other can be complete. I beg you to seek the 
presence that hallows your success, your wealth, 
your power, your friendship, your love, your 
hope ; that hallows the gay and beautiful side of 
life. Let the festive side of life lie in the sun- 
light of the Lord's sympathy and honor. 

3. Fellowship with the Lord is our hope in the 
tragedy of life. These guests of Jesus knew the 
tragedy of existence to unwonted depths ; they 
were publicans and sinners ; their hearts held 
dreadful secrets ; their memories were scorpions. 
The festive side of life rested upon tragedy as the 



346 BEVELATION AND THE IDEAL 

hemisphere of our earth that lies in the sunshine 
rests upon the hemisphere in midnight gloom. 
The burden that crushes men to the earth is the 
burden of dishonored ideals, extinguished hopes, 
immolated capacities ; the memory of the bar- 
tered sanctity of early years, the squandered 
wealth of youth ; the consciousness of broken 
vows and violated law ; the sense that one has 
been an evil influence in other lives, a dese- 
crator of beauty, in league with death, in cove- 
nant with hell. The moral tragedy in the hearts 
of human beings is vast, wild, fearful. Has any 
one ever sounded this depth of gloom and woe ? 
Has any soul gone there with sympathy vital 
enough to create hope in this hell of moral de- 
spair ? Is not our optimism ignorance, our light- 
heartedness shallowness, our easy programme of 
reform the shadow of a trivial conscience, our 
sure millennium the token that we have never 
looked into the night of human sin and despair ? 
Were not the patristic and mediaeval prophets 
immeasurably deeper and more serious than we ? 
If they did not see the benignity of God, they 
saw his moral integrity ; if they did not see the 
capacity of every soul to answer at last the ap- 
peal of God, they saw man's damaged humanity, 
the tragedy of his world. We are swift and sure 
because we are largely unaware of these ultimate 
realities, and being unaware we are without in- 



THE REDEMPTIVE IDEAL 347 

fluence. Our fine views are like the play of star- 
light upon polar ice. We are wanting in depth, 
in seriousness, in sympathy, in greatness of char- 
acter, in the influence born of the sense of crisis 
and tragedy. 

The Lord Jesus sounded the whole depth of 
our humanity and rose beyond its highest height. 
He was a guest at the wedding ; He went to the 
house of death ; He was the friend of rosy- 
cheeked, bright-eyed children ; He was the adora- 
tion of idealistic youth ; He was the friend of 
manhood and womanhood under the heat and 
burden of the day ; He surrounded Himself by his 
sympathy with the victims of inheritance, mis- 
fortune, perversity, disease, and evil of every 
kind ; He took them all up into his fellowship and 
began after that manner the sublime epoch of 
redemption. It has often been noticed that in 
many directions Socrates points the way of the 
Lord. We see Him at a banquet, eating and 
drinking with his pupils, listening to their talk 
about love with coarseness and buffoonery in it, 
with much in it offensive to a Christian mind, 
with much in it that must have been offensive to 
him ; he listened, eating and drinking with the 
rest of them. Then he speaks of love ; he takes 
that universal passion and lifts it till it becomes 
absorbed in the vision and passion of the eternal 
loveliness. We see Him again in the tragic side 



348 REVELATION AND THE IDEAL 

of life, as given in the " Phsedo." There he is, 
face to face with death ; with the mistake, the 
cruelty, the inhumanity of the world, calm, clear, 
serene ; he lifts the tragedy of the world, partly 
by his reasoning, but far more by his spirit, into 
hope in the presence of God. 

This is a genuine prophecy of what our Lord 
does, not for a few eminent disciples, but for all 
human beings who wait upon his ministry. He 
goes down into the depths and preaches hope to 
every soul. Do you know what that means ? Are 
there no young men here this morning who can 
remember times when they went into collapse, 
not because they were not well and strong, not 
because they did not have friends, not because 
the world was not inviting and full of oppor- 
tunity for them, but simply because they could 
see no ground of moral hope, no basis for hope 
of sovereignty over the courses of life ? When 
that hope came, was it not the coming of God ? 
There are no halleluiah choruses great enough to 
sound forth the tumult of delight in the soul of 
the man to whom hope of a redeemed manhood, 
after the image of Christ, has come. 

Does Jesus keep us only in his fellowship ? 
No. The ultimate goal of his thought was the 
Father. You have the sun and the planets re- 
volving round it ; the planets are in fellowship 
with the great solar luminary upon which they 



THE REDEMPTIVE IDEAL 349 

wait. That is not the whole splendid story. The 
sun is on a vast, indefinable, mysterious pilgrim- 
age through the infinite depths of space ; it is 
moving onward upon some goal unguessed by 
the profoundest student of the heavens, and all 
the planets are on the same pilgrimage, carried 
forever onward upon that same undefined, un- 
dreamt-of end. Thus the disciples of Jesus keep 
Him company; onward and onward still they fare 
with Him in his pilgrimage to the God and 
Father of all. To his disciples Jesus said, " Lo 
I am with you alway " ; here in his presence is 
the redemptive ideal might. Jesus said to the 
penitent thief, " To-day shalt thou be with me 
in Paradise " ; here again is the redemptive 
grace of his presence. His pilgrimage covers 
time and eternity, this world and all worlds ; 
when we join Him in this pilgrimage we are on 
the way to the eternal beatitude, we are moving 
to our home in God. 



XXVI 

THE IDEAL AND THE FACT 

" And while Peter thought on the vision the Spirit said unto him, Be- 
hold, three men seek thee." 

Acts X, 19. 

According to the Bible the actual world is the 
field of the ideal. In reference to the Old Testa- 
ment this faith is set forth in these striking 
words : " See that thou make all things accord- 
ing to the pattern shewed to thee in the mount." 
The ideal is to the actual as the design of the 
architect is to the mass of material to be raised 
into the great building. In the New Testament 
we at once recall our Lord's parable, " The king- 
dom of heaven is like unto leaven which a woman 
took and hid in three measures of meal till it was 
all leavened." The ideal is the spirit that pene- 
trates, exalts, and turns to new utility and beauty 
the bare material of the actual world. And here, 
in the text, the vision of Peter is the ideal. The 
three men seeking him represent the actual, and 
these two spheres stand to each other as power 
and opportunity. 

In the presence of this great insight and faith 
our age is often bewildered. It seems sometimes 
that there is no path from the ideal world to the 



THE IDEAL AND THE FACT 351 

actual or back again from the actual world to the 
ideal. The words of the apostle, " We brought 
nothing into this world and it is certain we can 
carry nothing out," are often applied to these 
two spheres of being. They are set apart ; they 
are independent, without communication, like the 
two divisions in Hades. In one division are as- 
sembled the righteous, in the other the wicked ; 
Lazarus is in bliss and Dives is in torment ; 
neither can go to the other because between them 
there is a great gulf fixed. Thus the ideal often 
seems the region in which are assembled our 
deepest insights, our purest desires, our loftiest 
longings, and our greatest hopes. The actual 
world is the place where we sin, where we break 
down, where we suffer, where we are defeated 
and die ; and between these two regions there 
seems to be an impassable gulf. 

This appears to me the profoundest and the 
most tremendous doubt in the world of men, the 
utmost blasphemy against life. Compared with 
this all other skepticism seems superficial. This 
doubt goes to the heart of everything and is equal 
to the denial of God, the denial of spirit in the 
universe, the denial of spirit in man, the denial 
of all hope here or hereafter. 

The doubt of which I have spoken goes on 
under our eyes. There is Goethe, the greatest of 
German poets, lyric and dramatic poet in one, a 



352 REVELATION AND THE IDEAL 

man of genius, a man of ideal affluence and 
beauty. The world has taken delight in that side 
of his character. What about his life? It cannot 
be told without shame. What is the defense made 
for it ? " Nature in such men must take its way." 
In that defense you wipe out all moral distinc- 
tions, in favor of your hero you abolish the moral 
world. Here is a business man, charming in his 
home, tender and beautiful in the whole circle 
of his domestic relations; there is the ideal side 
to his character. What is he in trade ? A Shy- 
lock ; look at his face of flint and his eyes of 
steel ; listen to his mockery as the youth of his 
time stand in his presence and plead for honor 
in trade. What is his defense ? " Business is 
business." It is to be run on the same principle 
as the enterprise of the jungle, the sharpest teeth 
and the strongest claw are the right from which 
there is no appeal. Consider the politician of a 
certain type ; among his friends he is obliging, 
he is engaging ; hear him speak of his tastes in 
literature and in art ; he appears a cultivated, 
high-minded gentleman. This is one side. Look 
at him in the field of politics, doing the dirty 
work of his party for a generation and growing 
rich at his job, buying and selling votes, trading 
in the honor of his country, and coming at last 
to the conclusion that the Ten Commandments 
in politics are an iridescent dream. What is the 



THE IDEAL AND THE FACT 353 

defense made for him ? That political life is a 
game, that victory is the goal, and every means 
to that end is fair. Look into religion, and take 
as our type of the religious rascal in all ages, — 
Judas ; he shares with delight the visions of his 
Master ; he quivers with emotion under his Mas- 
ter's power ; he lives with Him in his kingdom, 
sensitive, responsive ; and then he goes and cove- 
nants with his Master's enemies to betray Him 
to them for thirty pieces of silver. 

These examples call up a multitude whose lives 
support the contention that ideals are as impo- 
tent in the course of passion as the fisherman's 
nets are in the path of the incoming tide. That 
I have called the profoundest, the most tremen- 
dous, the deadliest doubt of our time. The ulti- 
mate blasphemy of man I take it to be. What 
have we to say against it? 

1. First, that the body is not primary but sec- 
ondary ; the body comes, in its uneasiness, in its 
distress, through the whole register of its appetite 
to the mind, reflects its condition in the mind, 
asks for interpretation of its distress and action 
thereupon. If the interpretation and action lead 
to the glutton, to the drunkard, to the sensualist, 
the body is not to blame, but the interpreter and 
doer ; if the interpretation and action lead to the 
well-ordered life, the life in honor, in reverence 
of itself, in reverence of humanity, the body is 



354 REVELATION AND THE IDEAL 

not to be praised, — the glory belongs to the 
mind. It was not a Christian but a student of 
man's nature who said, — 

" I am the master of my fate, 
I am captain of my soul." 

2. We reply, in the second place, that the 
body without the consent of the mind never yet 
did any evil. No man can show you an example 
where the body, without the consent of the mind, 
ever ran into excesses of any kind, into gluttony, 
into intemperance, into licentiousness; the consent 
of the mind must first be obtained, and the mind 
is answerable, not the body. " When sinners en- 
tice thee, consent thou not," is the admonition 
addressed not to the body but to the mind. The 
sinner in question may be a perfectly harmless, 
and indeed a beneficial, propensity, or he may be 
a fool in the form of a human being ; in either case 
the consent of the mind is essential to the debauch. 

3. We answer, in the third place, that there 
is an immemorial insight into the influence of 
the mind over the body, deepened and authenti- 
cated in a great way by investigations peculiar 
to our time. All the evils of the body, except 
those of an organic nature, may be initiated and 
promoted by an unwise or wicked mind ; all the 
evils of the b©dy, except those of an organic na- 
ture, may be greatly mitigated by a wise and a 
brave mind. The influence of the mind over the 



THE IDEAL AND THE FACT 355 

body has shot out with tremendous proportions 
into the intellect of our time. 

4. We reply, in the fourth place, that the 
good mind or the mind that would be good is 
supported by the great auxiliary force of the 
good environment. Who first awoke your love 
of beauty ? The loveliness of the earth and the 
sky, the great and beautiful words and ways of 
exalted human beings. Who first awoke your 
sense of music? The song of the bird, the mur- 
mur of the brook, the whisper of the wind among 
the trees, the anthem of the sea, that magnificent 
symphony of the sky, the thunderstorm, the glo- 
rious chorus of musical genius. Who first awoke 
your conscience from its slumber? Your heroes 
who had a vision of human good, who carried 
that vision of good over the whole domain of the 
actual and in its name denied passion in them- 
selves and in their fellow-men ; — these are they 
who called forth your conscience and made it 
alive. Who refined your intelligence, chastened 
your feeling, invigorated your moral will, called 
forth and organized all the fighting instincts of 
your nature in behalf of righteousness? Every 
good friend you have ever had, every great 
teacher, every noble book that has come your 
way, your home, the kingdom of God organized 
in your community and country. Changed ? We 
are changed one way or another from birth to 



356 REVELATION AND THE IDEAL 

death. We come into the world simply possibili- 
ties, and we turn out black earth or star-fire ac- 
cording as we consent to the guidance of the evil 
spirit or the prophet of God. We hurl back, there- 
fore, the deadly doubt which I have mentioned ; it 
is not an air from heaven, it is a blast from hell. 
5. Finally, there is the correspondence of the 
ideal and the actual world presented in the text. 
Peter's^ vision is the ideal ; the ideal is power ; 
the actual world is opportunity. Peter was a 
Jew ; the Jew was an aristocrat ; he had no high 
use for any one outside of the twelve tribes, and 
those outside had little use for him. The vision 
of that sheet, how beautiful was its adjustment 
to Peter's nature as a Jew ; the vision of the four- 
footed beasts of every description and creeping 
things and flying fowl. What did it mean ? That 
the heterogeneousness of humanity could be 
turned into a great brotherhood of souls and laid 
against the heart of God as its home. That was 
the vision. And the three men who were waiting 
were the actual world, the world of opportunity. 
Peter went with them into the heart of that Gen- 
tile world, trembling lest he should defile himself 
as a Jew and cut himself off from all hope of 
salvation. When he came into the home of 
Cornelius and saw what was going on there, he 
said, " Of a truth I perceive that God is no re- 
specter of persons" — what a discovery! The 



THE IDEAL AND THE FACT 357 

discovery is chiefly of Peter's midaiglit state of 
mind hitherto — " but in every nation he that 
feareth him and worketh righteousness is ac- 
ceptable to him." Thus Peter's vision ran into 
the mould of the actual world. 

What Peter needed most was enlightenment 
and breadth. This he got intellectually through 
the vision ; when he carried the vision into action 
he was truly an enlightened and broadened man 
and this was the course of his life from that day 
to the day of his death. 

For ourselves, what shall we say ? Your ideal 
is trust in God, and your life is surrounded with 
perplexities. Be sure your ideal is your power 
and these perplexities your opportunity. Break 
through them as a man breaks through a troop 
and leaps over a wall. Your ideal is your personal 
honor and you are confronted with terrible temp- 
tation ; but from the morning of time who ever 
had such an ideal without being so confronted ? 
Take your ideal and stand by it, resisting unto 
blood, striving against sin. Your ideal is one of 
sympathy with your kind ; go out into the great 
world in its agony and bloody sweat and pour 
your sympathy into its wounds, and you will see 
how the ideal finds its home in the world as God 
has made it. The ideal is in truth a prophet of 
the possibilities of manhood in every emergency 
of life. A day's work for a day's pay : there is 



358 BEVELATION AND THE IDEAL 

your ideal and there is your actual, side by side. 
Goods up to the level of the mutual understand- 
ing of the buyer and the seller ; there is your 
ideal in your actual world. The products of the 
farm, the mine, the factory, and the shop answer- 
ing to the contract made ; again there is your 
ideal in your actual. Wriggle out of your con- 
tract and you are not an honest man ; stand by 
it and you are a triumphant idealist. The world 
abandoned by the ideal is the world delivered 
over to Satan and his followers ; it is the Devil's 
world and not man's. 

So long as we keep these two spheres, the one 
as servant and the other as master ; so long as 
we toil at that problem, the universe is on our 
side. There is only one way out of the labyrinth ; 
follow the clue and you will emerge ; refuse to 
follow the clue and you never can emerge. Life 
is a labyrinth, and the only way that leads out 
of it is the shining moral ideal. " Deal justly, 
love kindness, and walk humbly with your God," 
— that is one form of the clue ; " seek first God's 
kingdom and righteousness," — that is another 
form ; "let this mind be in you which was als« 
in Christ Jesus," who had a sense of his sonhood 
to God and became the supreme servant of man. 
That is still another form of the great Christian 
clue to the labyrinth of life. 

On the whole, and in the long run, the actual 



THE IDEAL AND THE FACT 359 

world is conformed to the service of the ideal. 
There is the river Rhone, one of the most fasci- 
nating rivers of Europe. It rises in the Rhone 
Glacier, nearly six thousand feet above the sea- 
level, forges its way downward, through one dif- 
ficulty after another ; flows onward with the Ber- 
nese Alps on the north and the Lepontine and 
Pennine Alps on the south ; loses itself for forty- 
five miles in the great Lake of Geneva, emerges 
with greater might, sweeps round the southern 
spur of the Jura Mountains, winds through the 
famous city of Lyons, and like one who has 
gained his freedom it rolls on, silent and trium- 
phant to its goal in the Mediterranean. 

You may talk of the boulders in the path of 
the stream, the spurs of the mountains that turn 
it this way and that, the mighty ranges that 
crowd and determine its course ; you may speak 
of its submarine life as it shoots through Lake 
Leman ; you may dwell on all its windings and 
turnings and distresses as much as you please, 
but these are all incidents. From its source to 
the sea, over all those five hundred and four 
miles, the earth is in favor of the river; it cannot 
be resisted, it cannot be denied its goal. 

That is life. It takes its rise in God ; it has 
the power of that elevation evermore behind it. 
It meets temptations, sorrows, difficulties, trials, 
temporary defeats, submarine tragedies on the 



360 BEVELATION AND THE IDEAL 

way ; but from first to last the world, the uni- 
verse is in favor of the man who is the servant 
of the kingdom of God. And this is one of the 
great meanings of Palm Sunday. Jesus had one 
day of absolute triumph and that one day was 
the revelation of the structure of the human soul 
through all time ; the channel was laid bare in the 
light of that triumphant day in which Christ's 
Gospel was to run, have free course and be glori- 
fied. There are few doubts that cause me much 
trouble ; our doubts are, for the most part, inci- 
dent to the finiteness of man. There is, however, 
one doubt that means death to manhood, — that is 
the denial to the soul of power to carry into life 
the honor of the Lord Jesus Christ. That is not 
a mere doubt ; it is a lie born of the brutal ex- 
perience of the world, and every honest man 
must stand out against it as its sworn, eternal 
foe because of the interests of his own humanity 
and the humanity of his kind. 

The vision to-day is matched by the three 
men waiting at the door to show us the path to 
service. The vision is the ideal ; the ideal is the 
final resistless power. The actual world is oppor- 
tunity ; in opportunity the actual world waits 
upon and supplicates the ideal for freedom, ex- 
altation, and peace. The ideal and the actual be- 
long together in sacramental union : "What God 
hath joined together let not man put asunder." 



XXVII 
THE POSTPONED IDEAL 

" Until the day dawn." 

Pet. 1, 19. 

These words are poetry, and like aU great poetry 
they carry in them a philosophy of man's life and 
of the wild, infinite universe in which that life is 
set. They reveal the attitude of a disciple of the 
Lord Jesus living in the first half of the second 
century of our era. He had found something 
great, something inexpressibly precious. It was 
his duty to hold that treasure fast and his duty 
was illumined by a great hope. Everything within 
him, everything about him, was unsatisfactory ; 
the ideal of life and the world was a postponed 
ideal. 

It is worth while for us to look at this post- 
poned ideal through the mood of this ancient dis- 
ciple of the Lord, and guided by the exquisite 
poetry of his words. 

1. In the first place, this man was living in 
the twilight of existence. Gloom overhung his 
entire world. He was able to make out something 
about the reality of God, the truth and the power 
of the Lord Jesus in whom he believed, the 
spirituality of his own human nature, the moral 



362 BEVELATION AND THE IDEAL 

dignity of his brethren ; he was able to see a 
little way into the meaning and the necessity 
of the stern discipline under which he and his 
fellow-disciples lived and suffered, believed and 
hoped. But everything was incomplete, the light 
was nowhere clear and full ; it was confused, it 
was dim, it was twilight. 

Was he not faithful to the spirit of his time ? 
Consider that for a moment, in order that we 
may do justice to him. Jesus is no longer living 
in the world ; long ago He left it. The tradition 
of his ministry and power is well rendered here 
and ill rendered there ; nowhere does it wield ab- 
solute sway over the intelligence of this man's 
time. The apostles of Jesus are all dead and 
gone ; the tradition of their power, well expressed 
here, ill expressed there, has lost something of 
its clearness and serenity ; like all other tradi- 
tions it has become dim. The fellow-disciples of 
this man are poor enough, often squalid enough ; 
in their lives they are frequently hardly to be 
distinguished from the pagans by whom they are 
isurrounded. Woe lies upon this man's world, 
slavery is in it, cruelty is in it, outrage of man's 
rights is in it, lust and shame are in it, violence 
and murder and the universal experience of all 
time, — sickness, suffering, bereavement, sorrow, 
death. Doubtless this man feels that God, too, 
is in the world, but clouds and darkness are 



THE POSTPONED IDEAL 363 

roundabout Him ; his way is in the great waters 
and his footsteps are not known. 

Does not this recall much in the mood of our 
own time ? We are reconsidering the value of 
the tradition about Jesus ; we are reconsidering 
the apostolic tradition ; we are reexamining the 
entire history of Christian belief from the morn- 
ing of the resurrection tiU now ; we are recon- 
sidering the social order, the structure of human 
life, individual, domestic, and political. Every- 
where we are reading the meaning of existence 
and the meaning of the universe through the dim 
light in which we are making our pilgrimage 
through time. We are full of unrest ; we have a 
world to explore and understand, we are living 
and working in the twilight. 

2. In the second place, this man was living in 
the twilight before sunrise, not in the twilight 
after sunset. There is here an infinite difference. 
Somehow the light was increasing, not decreas- 
ing ; the darkness was departing, not rolling in 
upon him in ever thicker gloom. More and more 
he saw Jesus living with power in the lives of 
individual men ; more and more he saw Jesus' 
power breaking into the social order of the 
Koman Empire, influencing its political genius 
and activity ; more and more he saw the Lord 
getting into the books of the time, becoming the 
problem of the mightiest intellects of the day ; 



364 REVELATION AND THE IDEAL 

more and more he saw his Master getting into 
man's work, into his home, into his thoughts, into 
his entire conception of the universe. So this dis- 
ciple waited in the twilight before sunrise, anti- 
cipating the coming apocalypse of God. 

Here again it seems to me this man brings out 
through his mood the best spirit in our own time. 
Take, for example, the conditions of labor. We 
often think as we look into them that the world 
is growing worse and not better. That, however, 
is a mistake. Consider the conditions of the sailor 
to-day and one hundred years ago ; go into the 
fiery dens occupied by the stokers in an ocean 
steamer thirty years back and into the corre- 
sponding places occupied by the stokers in a 
steamer recently launched. Then you see the 
difference. When the Oregon, then the ocean 
greyhound, the fastest and finest ship on the 
Atlantic, went to the bottom of the sea off Long 
Island about twenty years since, discipline held 
everywhere except among the stokers. And one 
who was on board, who saw the region in which 
they lived, the horrors amid which they worked, 
said, " You could expect nothing else : only dev- 
ils can come out of hell ! " In Great Britain, 
when I was a boy, the engineers, plowing through 
winter cold and storm, had no shelter in the cab 
of the engine ; now they have it everywhere. 
When the electric cars began to run in Boston, 



THE POSTPONED IDEAL 365 

every motorman was exposed to the severity of 
the weather ; social opinion has compelled the 
protection of the motorman. These are simply 
hints of a universal achievement. The mechanics 
of to-day have better homes, more comfortable, 
more sanitary far than the kings of Europe had 
three hundred years ago. Does this mean that 
everything is perfect ? Far from it ; nothing is 
perfect, nothing is satisfactory, nothing is as it 
should be ; but progress is clear, the light is in- 
creasing, the darkness is going ; we are in the 
twilight before daybreak. 

Consider the field of knowledge. Look at the 
science of biology, and what it is doing for the 
protection of human beings against disease. 
Think of the science of chemistry, and what that 
science is doing for the protection of human 
foods and for the increase of the productive 
power of the earth. Take the science of physics, 
and look at the physical universe as given us by 
that science ; consider the surprise, the wonder 
that the material universe has become under the 
magic touch of this science. Rise into the human 
sphere ; look at the great movement for the social 
betterment of human beings ; it is proceeding 
from the influence of the brotherhood of man. 

Rise higher, into the Christian religion, and 
see the new grasp of Jesus' kingdom of man, his 
kingdom of God ; witness the ten thousand agen- 



366 REVELATION AND THE IDEAL 

cies that are being used to apply his spirit and 
the remedies of his Gospel to the moral condi- 
tions of the world. Rise to the highest sphere of 
all, to that increasing consciousness of the In- 
finite God coming through man's better under- 
standing of man, — individual, domestic, social, 
political, racial. Nothing is satisfactory any- 
where ; every science is in its infancy, every form 
of service waits for new light and life. We are 
still like Sir Isaac Newton in his comparison of 
himself to a child picking up a pebble on the 
shore with the whole undiscovered region of real- 
ity symbolized by the mighty sea. Nothing is 
perfect, everything is imperfect, but we are 
gaining, light is coming, darkness is going, evil 
is less, goodness is more, truth is slowly conquer- 
ing falsehood, man is advancing in his sovereignty 
over the brute. 

3. In the third place, this disciple of the Lord 
living in the morning twilight was able to recog- 
nize his duty even in the dim light and to address 
himself to that. He saw his f eUow-disciples mov- 
ing about him ; he stood in different relations to 
his kind ; he recognized his obligations ; and 
though his knowledge was incomplete, he was 
able to honor those obligations and do his duty 
like a man. Read the meaning of your own life, 
of your brother's life, of the society and the 
world in which you live; read the meaning of 



i 



THE POSTPONED IDEAL 367 

the mysterious universe in which our human 
world is set by the light as it shines in your own 
time ; it may be dim, it may be confused, it cer- 
tainly is incomplete, but you can see a little, and 
the little that you see, in God's name, do ! 

Man is not only a seer, he is a doer. The seer 
alone is incompetent ; the seer and the doer must 
unite if life ia to be sane and strong. Take your 
strength at its poor best and turn it into a deed, 
make your vocation utter your twilight visions. 
Omniscience is desirable, but it is attainable in 
no least part of any subject ; it is desirable, but 
it is not necessary in order that we should do 
the duty of the hour and day. 

When the civil service examinations began to 
be held, they were rather awkwardly conducted. 
On one occasion a candidate for an office, a hum- 
ble office in the custom-house, was asked if he 
knew how far distant the sun is from the earth. 
" No, not exactly," he replied, " but I know that 
it is far enough away not to interfere with me 
in the performance of my duties in the custom- 
house ! " The finest surgeon in the world, the 
ablest navigator, the wisest statesman, the mighti- 
est prophet, each is conscious all the time of the 
sorest limits to his knowledge ; but each can act, 
and act well, and when a man has done his best 
in the given circumstances of his life, he has 
satisfied the law of God and man. 



368 REVELATION AND THE IDEAL 

The best way to wait for the coming of the per- 
fect day is to work at the tasks that are set for 
us in the twilight. All the sciences are but twi- 
light apprehensions of truth ; the complete intel- 
lectual appreciation of the universe is a postponed 
satisfaction. The vision of the world as it stood 
in the mind of Jesus is as yet unattained ; the 
comprehension of his Gospel is nowhere closed, 
nowhere adequate. The political condition of the 
nation is a welter of justice and injustice, strength 
and weakness. The higher opportunities are given 
to the overwhelming majority of human beings 
only through grinding toil and mean pain. The 
higher mind of the race is less than we need; 
that higher mind is inaccessible to the multitude. 
Social reform is only an infant crying in the 
night, education covers but a meagre part of 
man's need, his requisite outfit for life. Man's 
inhumanity to man is everywhere in evidence. 
There is an altruism exacted of the egoist by the 
nature of things ; voluntary altruism is the pos- 
session of the few ; it is as rare as sainthood. 
The moral conflict of the earnest portion of the 
community is with the baser moods ; like Paul 
they have fought with beasts at Ephesus, unlike 
Paul they have so far failed of victory and are 
still fighting. Contentment with the wages of 
virtue, serenity in the heart of trouble, rest in 
the Lord amid the wreck of things seen and 



THE POSTPONED IDEAL 369 

temporal, a mind above the world, and able with 
the Platonic philosopher to view all time and all 
existence, to consider the earthly life a smaU 
affair detached from the eternal, and to look 
upon death with high disdain or with welcome ; 
ability to join Paul in his triumphant lyric, " All 
things work together for good to them that love 
God," are still in the sphere of the ideal ; they 
are not present but prophetic attainments. 

The question returns. How shall we wait for 
the greater life ? Again the answer comes. Wait 
at your work, wait in the f uU and happy exercise 
of your present power. Wait for the perfect day 
as men in the Far North wait for the polar sun- 
rise. What is the appearance upon which they 
look? There is a faint flush in the east one 
morning ; soon it fades and is gone. This flush 
is succeeded by another a little stronger and 
lasting a little longer. Still another flush comes, 
richer in tone, rising higher, promising more. 
Thus it goes on for many weeks before the great 
day is born that is to flood their whole world 
with perpetual light. 

While this process is going forward, what is 
the attitude of these brave peoples ? They stand 
to the task of life as it appears in the twilight. 
They are able to recognize one another ; they see 
their work ; they find their homes ; they are in a 
community of human beings ; in aU this they 



370 REVELATION AND THE IDEAL 

have their duty, and this they accept and do with 
courage and gladness. Their courage and glad- 
ness are all the more spontaneous because they 
are living in the twilight before dawn. 

Here in parable we have the world of the an- 
cient disciples of Jesus whose words are our text ; 
here in symbol is our own world. The light is 
dim, but it is becoming less dim ; the flush is 
deeper from decade to decade ; it is rising higher, 
it is spreading wider, it is prophetic of something 
greater in the coming time. What shall we do in 
this intensel}' interesting but sadly incomplete 
existence ? Work in the light that we have. We 
know the order of the world ; we see one another ; 
we can make out our task. We are able to feel 
God with a greater sureness and to a greater 
depth ; we are gaining in closeness to the spirit of 
the Lord ; we can discern something of the mean- 
ing of the noble tragedy in which we live. Here 
is our treasure ; let us hold it fast till the day 
dawn, the great, splendid, all-illuminating, cloud- 
less day of the Lord. 



XXVIII 
THE IDEAL EVENING 

<* Man goeth forth unto his work and to his labor ontil the evening." 

Ps. crv, 23. 

In these words as in sl picture the leading fea- 
tures of man's life in this world are presented. 
While we look upon this picture it is as if we 
were beholding the life of man represented upon 
the canvas of some great master. This is the 
chief service rendered by the highest works of 
genius. Human life is in a large way represented 
in them, and while we give our attention to them 
the vision of it, sad and yet beautiful, is rising in 
our hearts. We read the Book of Job and it 
seems as if we stood where we could behold the 
sorrow of humanity, the whole terrible and yet 
divine movement of man's life. We read the 
great tragedies of Shakespeare, — " Hamlet,'* 
" Othello," " Lear," — and we feel as if the en- 
tire human race were upon the stage before us. 
The everlasting charm of Dante's poem lies here. 
It is a symbol of the ultimate meaning of man's 
life, the awful world of self-will and woe, the ter- 
rible realm of purification and suffering, the 
blessed sphere of peace and the beatific vision — 
these idtimate and highest aspects of existence 



372 BEVELATION AND THE IDEAL 

are exhibited in the mighty song, as in a symbol. 
While we linger in its great presence, we are 
looking upon the drama of history, we are be- 
holding the spiritual forces that work through 
man's life, we are witnessing the profoundest 
issues of time. 

In the text we have a flash from the soul of a 
great religious genius. " Man goeth forth unto 
his work and to his labor until the evening." The 
history of every true man is there, the history of 
mankind. It is there in the utmost truthfulness 
and pathos. The symbol is the day. One day, 
with its morning, noon, and evening, comprehends 
the existence of the individual, the existence of 
the race. The life of a single human being, the life 
of all human beings, the duration of the planet on 
which we live, the age of the solar system, the 
whole breadth of astronomic time, is but a day in 
the eternal years of God. And upon this won- 
drous picture to which our existence is reduced, 
and in which it is so faithfully, pathetically, 
beautifully presented, we are to look for the 
lesson of the morning. 

1. The first thought from the comparison of 
human existence to a day is of that in it for 
which we are not responsible. You cannot have 
a day without weather. It may be fair or foul, a 
splendor or a storm from beginning to end, — it 
may open in a morning without clouds, continue 



THE IDEAL EVENING 373 

in brightness, and close in an evening of inef- 
fable loveliness. It may present in itself the 
greatest contrasts ; it may rain at daybreak, clear 
up at noon, and go to wreck again before night. 
Or the storm may howl all day long until near 
the close ; and then a transcendent burst of glory 
may transfigure the entire earth and sky. Or it 
may rain and shine alternately, and all varieties 
of weather may be crowded into the space of 
twelve hours ; spring, summer, autumn, and 
winter may all be there. From the farmer's point 
of view, all this is mere fortune. Nobody is re- 
sponsible for the weather. However much a man 
in bad temper may wish to find fault with those 
about him, while in his senses he cannot blame 
any one for bad weather ; nor again can the most 
inveterate flatterer give to any person credit 
for the fineness of the day. Here is something 
that is made for us, that we cannot alter, that we 
must take as we find it. The weather, good or 
bad, is an expression of the sovereignty of God, 
and at the same time it is a symbol of all in life 
over which man can have no control, and for 
which he is in no way responsible. 

Look at it in the line of good fortune. How 
many men are vain because of their size, or their 
shapeliness, or their good looks ; and how they 
take their amusement out of those who in all 
these particulars present a contrast to them- 



374 REVELATION AND THE IDEAL 

selves, who are inferior in size, in shape, and in 
appearance. Others feel proud because they hap- 
pened to be born in one state rather than in an- 
other, in this country rather than in that, in the 
upper classes in society and not in the lower, in 
particular families with a known and honorable 
history, and not in families with but little history 
and that little not very good. How many feel 
better than their neighbors because of the wealth 
that has been left them, or the education that 
has been made possible for them, or the high 
positions that have happened to come in their 
way. Others set up a claim to superiority upon 
their greater gifts. They have gifts for music, 
and for art generally, for science and philosophy, 
it may be for the professions and for the public 
service, which other men do not possess at all, 
or which they possess in very inferior degrees. 
Upon that consciousness of superior gifts they 
cultivate disdain of their fellow-men. It is as if 
the man with the two talents were to look with 
contempt upon the man with the one talent ; and 
again, as if the man with the two talents were 
the subject of the scorn of the man with the five 
talents. This mood invades the religious life. 
There were Pharisees in the time of Christ and 
they have been with the Church in all subsequent 
times. They feel that they are holier than the 
average Christain, holier by nature, which may 



THE IDEAL EVENING 375 

very well be true. Upon this natural gift for 
religion and for the better side of existence they 
base a claim to arrogant superiority over those 
who have no inheritance of this order. 

The reply to this entire mood, wherever man- 
ifested, lies in the text, and it is an overwhelm- 
ing reply. All good fortune, whether in person, 
in position, in gifts of estate, intelligence, or in- 
herited moral tendency, — all good fortune is 
mere weather. You have no more to do with the 
making of it than with a perfect day in June. 
You have no more right to credit for it than you 
have for some glorious day in early autumn. It 
is simply weather, made for you, sent upon you, 
with which you have nothing to do, and for which 
you can claim no credit. To be vain over natural 
gifts is as much out of place as it would be for 
a Laplander to boast of his starry nights, or an 
Egyptian of the fineness of his climate. It is a 
striking illustration of how much God has done 
for most men, and of how little they have done 
for themselves, that when they set up claims of 
superiority it is usually upon the good fortune, 
the fine weather, that has come to them. 

The point that I am making applies equally 
to the line of bad fortune. Why should a man 
care for what he is by nature ? Why should he 
be ashamed because he was born poor, because 
no signal gifts of person, intelligence, or moral 



376 REVELATION AND THE IDEAL 

inclination were bestowed upon him, because in 
his total outfit at the hands of nature he is but 
an average human being ? It is the weather again, 
and this time the day happens to be only toler- 
ably good. Let him put the responsibility upon 
the weather-maker ; it is none of his. 

A man may regret that for his work's sake 
he was not born with a stronger constitution ; he 
may be sorry for the sake of his family that he 
does not come of a long-lived race. He may 
shrink from the disappointments that come to 
him, and the many trials. He may feel his whole 
nature recoil from the coming of repeated and 
terrible bereavements. He may feel that his en- 
vironment is almost too hard to live in. But let 
him recognize God's part in it, and his own. Let 
him see this whole line of bad fortune in its true 
character. It is none of his doing ; he cannot 
help it. It is weather ; a day of tempest, of sleet 
and snow has been ordained for him. God does 
not expect him to behave in it as if the day were 
glorious ; he expects only such a record as a storm- 
tossed, sorely-tried, much-afflicted man can rea- 
sonably make. The record passages of the great 
ocean steamers are all made in fine weather. It 
is then that they get praise in all the newspapers ; 
it is then that their names become familiar words 
aU the world over. But I have often thought 
that if the captain with true insight should speak, 



THE IDEAL EVENING 377 

he would put down as the supreme record of his 
ship, not her flying trip in fine weather, but her 
brave battle in midwinter with tremendous seas 
from shore to shore, her splendid endurance man- 
ifested in storms in which it would seem that 
nothing could live, her steady, patient, and vic- 
torious response to engine and wheel throughout 
the terrible voyage, her safe and sound emer- 
gence into the quiet of the harbor, after a fort- 
night of utmost distress upon the deep. When 
the captain thought of his passengers, of his em- 
ployers, of his wife and children, and of his own 
life, that seemed to him the record passage. "When 
God shall speak, as He will some day ; when He 
shall say, " Well done, good and faithful serv- 
ant," He will not show us what we did in our 
good fortune, when the sea was like a mill-pond 
and all the winds of heaven were but ministering 
spirits to our comfort. In such conditions we re- 
ceive the praise of men ; in such conditions fame 
comes, and names are carried, perhaps, round 
the globe. God will show us what we did for Him 
under tremendous temptation ; how we bore our- 
selves when the sea of trouble was running high ; 
how we looked to Him and obeyed Him in the 
great waters ; how in the face of the tempest, al- 
though with long delays, we came to port and 
anchored at his side at last. This and not that 
is our record according to the captain of our sal- 



378 REVELATION AND THE IDEAL 

vation. The weather, fine or terrible, is of God's 
appointment ; our responsibility is fixed by some- 
thing else. 

2. Thus we come to the second thought of the 
text, work. The character of the day expresses 
God's sovereignty and responsibility; the work 
to be done in it is the note of man's sovereignty 
and responsibility. Look at that farmer going 
forth to his work and to his labor until the even- 
ing. He has something to do in that field before 
nightfall. That is his task, that is the task of 
man. God gives such opportunity as it pleases 
Him ; to man it belongs to improve such oppor- 
tunity as is given. 

Work is the main business in the world, and 
I believe it is the chief source of happiness, and 
of noble human character. We can all see that 
it is the main business. If the human race would 
survive, it must find the means of subsistence. 
It is a consuming race ; it therefore must be a 
producing race ; and if its productions are in the 
interest of a full and noble life, one part of them 
is as honorable as another. The race demands a 
vast variety of foods, of residences, of dress, of 
places of abode ; it demands in addition to the 
ministries on the material line, ministries to the 
sense of beauty, the sense of truth, the sense of 
right. Accordingly we have the gigantic and be- 
wilderingly diversified economic productions and 



THE IDEAL EVENING 379 

distributions, the vast response to the material 
demand ; we have the wonderful accumulation in 
the fine arts for the aesthetic demand ; we have 
further the amazing mass of science and philos- 
ophy for the intellectual demand ; and lastly, in 
answer to the moral need, the moral wisdom of 
the world, the religion of Christ. Here is the 
immense and immensely diversified demand, the 
immense and diversified production to meet the 
demand. Somewhere in this vast order every life 
is to find its place. There will be the producers 
and distributors on the material level ; the same 
work waits to be done upon all the levels. The 
civilization that we try to carry forward and en- 
rich is like a house with four stories. First, there 
is the physical basis of life, the production and 
distribution that keep the world alive. The sec- 
ond story is reserved for the fine arts ; the third 
for science and philosophy ; the fourth and last, 
with its roof of pure glass, a window forever into 
the Eternal, is for religion. 

You have here an answer to the question, 
What is Christian work? Is it confined to dis- 
tributing tracts, going to prayer-meetings, and 
help given in the running of a church ? Christian 
work is anything done in behalf of the largest 
and best conception of life ; it is work done upon 
any one of the four great levels of human exist- 
ence. The Christian workman may be employed 



380 REVELATION AND THE IDEAL 

on the first, or the second, or the third, or the 
fourth story of his Father's house. He may be a 
Christian in business, a Christian in art, a Chris- 
tian in science and philosophy, or a Christian in 
the highest and most difficult level, a Christian 
in religion. As in every house a stairway leads 
from foundation to roof, and as this is the high- 
way and common meeting-place of all the stories, 
so the motive of the workman if it is one of honor 
and love, is the path that connects all the levels 
of Christian service, it is the force that makes 
all the workmen brothers. 

Here, then, is the scheme into which our life 
falls. We may work upon whichever level we 
desire, but the level is not the supremely im- 
portant thing, it is the work done. The cup of 
cold water, the service to the poor, the works of 
humanity and mercy upon which the righteous 
are welcomed in the great judgment parable of 
Christ — these are all material works, duty done 
upon the first story in our Father's house, but 
how worthy and mighty they are made to appear ! 
The day is God's to appoint, its length and its 
character ; to do something in it, upon some one 
of the four great levels of existence, and from 
such a motive as will make it shine with the 
spirit and love of Christ — that is the obligation, 
serious and beautiful, of man. 

3. After the day, at its close, and as its close, 



THE IDEAL EVENING 381 

comes the evening. After the work of life comes 
the rest that remain eth to the people of God. 
The beauty of the symbol here we must all feel. 
After a day of toil the evening is a benediction. 
The ideals of the day are unconsciously sur- 
rendered for those of the night. The strength of 
purpose and desire out of which those ideals rose, 
like the very sun itself is spent, and in the vast 
fields of the weariness that now begins to fall 
upon the workman the quiet stars appear. Look 
at the farmer as he goes to his work in the 
morning. How full of strength and happiness he 
is. Look at him when the day's work is done re- 
turning to his rest. Which is the happier time, 
the morning or the evening? It is impossible to 
say because the happiness belongs to contrasted 
moods. In the opening day it is the happiness 
of activity ; in the closing day it is the happiness 
of rest. Wherever we look in the natural world, 
we must say that the peace of the evening in its 
own place is as beautiful as the rush of the 
morning. 

Such should be our thoughts in the anticipa- 
tion of the close of life in this world. We need 
not indulge in the anticipation, if it is painful so 
to do. But we may be very sure that if the day is 
vigorously improved, if we strive with our full 
strength, or with anything like it, for the accom- 
plishment of the duty set before us, we shaU not 



382 REVELATION AND THE IDEAL 

regret it when we see the sun descending in the 
west, we shall not be sorry when we feel that at 
length the evening is come. Our strength will be 
spent, and our eager passion for life will have 
abated. Slowly in the fading light the great 
change will pass over our thoughts and feelings, 
the ideals proper to youth and to manhood, the 
auroral fires and forms that woke our passion in 
the morning and sustained it at noon will give 
place to other and better things, and our hearts 
will be visited with visions out of the glory of 
sunset. The Transfiguration will come of its own 
sweet accord ; we shall be as happy to sleep as 
once we were to wake, to be at rest as one day 
we were to be at work. 

Death was never meant to be to man the hor- 
ror that it so often is. It was meant as an answer 
to the well-spent and finished life, whether that 
life is long or short. Man is sent forth unto his 
work until the evening. He is sent forth to his 
great moral task in this world ; he is sent forth 
full of aspirations and power. When the power 
is gone and the day's work done, the evening 
comes in the peace and beauty of the Lord. All 
our anxiety should be until the evening ; when 
that has come, we should have none. We have 
toiled the entire day, the opportunity is here 
ended, and our strength and desire are spent. 
The release is a boon ; the rest is from God. 



THE IDEAL EVENING 383 

" The storm is changed into a calm, 
At his command and will; 
So that the waves which raged before 
Now quiet are and still! 

" Then are they glad, because at rest, 
And quiet now they be; 
So to the haven he then brings 
Which they desired to see." 

The final suggestion in the text is not of rest, 
but a prophecy of new activity. The evening and 
the morning were the first day, and ever since 
evening has been followed by morning ; the period 
of repose by a new opportunity for achievement. 
This last suggestion comes to us in the evening 
telling us of the new day which waits for our re- 
newed power. This succession of days and nights, 
this marvelous alternation of activity and repose, 
this dual existence wherein we wake to sleep, and 
sleep to wake, carries us into the great thought 
of the endless life. Never since the sun first 
rose and set upon the world has this succession 
been broken. Never has there been a day upon 
which there did not succeed an evening, and 
never an evening and night upon which there did 
not rise a new day. Never since human beings 
appeared upon this planet has there been a man 
who did not have some opportunity and whose 
opportunity did not come to an end ; never has 
there been a human life that eventually was 
not overtaken by death. The day of life and the 



384 BEVELATION AND THE IDEAL 

evening of death are universal facts. But we must 
believe that never yet has death come that a new 
sphere of being was not sighted, that new regions 
of opportunity did not dawn, that fresh powers 
of faith and of service were not bestowed. As 
upon the night rises the new day, so we must be- 
lieve that upon death rises the fresh and radiant 
opportunity. 

It is this faith that makes life solemn and 
beautiful. Whatever may be the character of our 
environment, whether our fortune be good or bad, 
the weather stormy or serene ; on whichever level 
God has appointed for us our task ; however soon 
and with whatever surprises and regrets the even- 
ing may drop down upon us, we can take it all 
bravely and thankfully if only we are sure of re- 
stored strength and the new and more glorious 
to-morrow. The solemn and yet cheerful beauty 
of evening after a laborious day lies here. The 
retrospect is on the whole gladdening, the history 
is on the whole good; and the prospect is all 
bright with promise, the future is full of the 
deepest inspiration. Between this history and 
this hope the toiler seeks repose ; between this 
past and this glorious future the servant of God 
lies down to pleasant dreams. 



XXIX 

THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL AND ENDLESS 
LIFE 

'• Ye therefore shall be perfect as your heavenly 
Father is perfect." 

Matt. V, 48. 

The entire body of the teaching of Jesus Christ 
is in the atmosphere of the endlessness of man's 
life. Few are the words of Jesus upon this sub- 
ject, because it is present as an illuminating 
spirit in all his utterances. We hear Him speak 
of the universe as his Father's house and of the 
abodes in that house for all the children of his 
Father ; we note with intensity of interest his 
words to the penitent thief, " To-day shalt thou 
be with me in Paradise " ; we ponder his great 
answer to the Sadducees, " God is not the God 
of the dead but of the living, for all live unto 
him " ; but we fail utterly to apprehend the 
teaching of the Lord if we conclude that these 
great and precious utterances are all that He has 
said concerning the destiny of man. 

While He spoke his parables of the kingdom 
of God on the shores of the Sea of Galilee; 
while He fixed the solemn attention of his dis- 
ciples on the wise man who built his house upon 



386 REVELATION AND THE IDEAL 

the rock, and on the foolish man who built his 
house upon the sand, as He sat on the Mount of 
Beatitudes and watched the sweet industry of 
the birds of heaven and the lilies of the field 
blooming far and wide ; while He told the mul- 
titudes in Judaea the story of the lost son in the 
gloom of overshadowing hills, the Syrian sun- 
shine was flooding his outward world. In the 
same way his whole teaching is in the sunshine 
and glory of the endless life of man. God is our 
Father in heaven ; we are his family in the earth ; 
the link between our lives and God cannot be 
broken ; for weal or for woe we live here and 
there, for happiness or misery our existence is 
forever. That happiness is the inseparable con- 
comitant of worth, moral worth ; that misery is 
the evil issue of a cruel and inhuman soul. In 
the Syrian sunshine the Master spoke his great 
words, the sunshine which all felt while no one 
said anything about it ; in the splendor of man's 
endless destiny as the child of God, Jesus ut- 
tered his whole message. Seldom did He dwell 
upon it because it was the universal and radiant 
atmosphere of the entire body of his ideas. 

It sometimes happens that words that to our first 
consideration seem wildly extravagant turn out to 
be to our profounder thought the sanest and the 
purest wisdom. We have an example in the text. 
At first sight what could be more extravagant, 



CHRISTIAN IDEAL AND ENDLESS LIFE 387 

more wildly extravagant than to ask of man the 
perfection that we find in God ? Would it be fair 
to ask of a child the wise thinking, the mature 
feeling, the resolute purpose, the continuous and 
faithful exertion that we rightly ask of a full- 
grown person ? And yet the difference between 
God and man is infinitely greater than the differ- 
ence between a man and a child. Would it be 
just to ask the same responsible citizenship of 
a weak-minded person that we rightfully ask of a 
reasonable being? And yet the difference be- 
tween God and man is infinitely greater than the 
difference between the strongest and the weakest 
human mind. Are not the words therefore mock- 
ery, " Ye therefore shall be perfect as your 
heavenly Father is perfect " ? What do they 
mean? 

They mean that men are apt to live without 
principle, by vagrant desire, by shifting moods, 
by various, unfixed, and contradictory interests. 
This is unworthy, that is not the way that their 
God lives. He lives on eternal principles ; the ex- 
pressions may vary, but the moving power in his 
being is always the same and the highest. He 
makes his sun to shine on the evil and the good ; 
He sends his rain on the just and the unjust. 
His mood toward the whole world is perpetual, 
unchanging, eternal magnanimity. Jesus calls 
men to live not without principle, and not ac- 



388 REVELATION AND THE IDEAL 

cording to the evil custom of the world whereby 
men like those who like them and hate those 
who hate them. He calls upon them to live on 
principle, and to find the principle of their living 
in God ; to find an ideal, a governing ideal for 
their existence, in the character of the Eternal. 
" Lift your vision to God," He seems to say, 
" behold how he lives and how he loves, and take 
your ideal, your obligation, your vocation out of 
the heart of the Infinite." 

In the words of the text Jesus describes our 
task, our vocation as men. In so doing. He gives 
to us the surest and the most comforting of all 
insights concerning the future world. Our task 
is perfection ; that task is conditioned upon time ; 
that we may do our duty we need endless oppor- 
tunity. 

The subject that comes before us here may be 
variously stated. It may take the form of end- 
less time as the condition of an endless task ; it 
may look toward the vocation of men as the east 
where we greet the sunrise of faith ; it may fix 
attention upon the Christian ideal of the com- 
plete human life and there fill the mind with 
the divine meaning of our existence. Whichever 
statement we make carries in it the same thought, 
whichever path we take comes to the same goal. 
Our task, our vocation, our ideal is the revela- 
tion of our nature as men, our relation to God 



CHRISTIAN IDEAL AND ENDLESS LIFE 389 

and our destiny. The revelation is given to those 
who mourn, but it is not given through their 
tears ; it is for the tempted, the perplexed, the 
weary and heavy-laden, the bereaved and broken- 
hearted, but it is conditioned upon no one of 
these experiences, nor upon all of them put to- 
gether. The revelation of man's endless career 
comes through his vocation as the servant of the 
ideal. 

Let us dwell upon this solitary height for a 
moment and survey our world through its pure 
and serene air. When we believe in human im- 
mortality because of the cry of the heart in be- 
reavement, we wonder sometimes if that cry finds 
response in the heart of the Eternal. Our love for 
our dead makes its plea for endless life and the 
possibility of reunion. That love is great and its 
plea is sound and strong, but it is not the sound- 
est and the strongest. When we survey the mis- 
fortune of the multitude, the misery of the many, 
the disappointed wills and the defeated lives, the 
suffering, the confusion and mystery of human 
history, the sore and terrible tragedy of the world, 
and demand a future life in which the unmean- 
ing woe of time shall come to triumphant issues, 
we make an impressive demand ; but there is a 
demand still more impressive. When we think 
first, last, and all the time of our duty as men; 
when we take our existence through our con- 



390 * REVELATION AND THE IDEAL 

science : when we seek for the meaning of our 
being in our work ; when we see in our work the 
form of discipline by which we get rid of all un- 
worthiness and put all on worth, advancing with 
steadfast steps in an order, a rigorous order of 
earthly utilities upon the goal of greater likeness 
to the God and Father of Christ ; when we read 
our nature in the light of our solemn task and 
construe our destiny through our vocation as ser- 
vants of an infinite ideal, we know that we are 
standing upon uttermost reality, that our feet 
are planted upon the final and moral integrity 
of the universe. Then we are able to say with 
Browning's Grammarian : — 

" Leave now for dogs and apes — 
Man has forever." 

1. Man's vocation thus construed carries with 
it certain conditions without which it cannot be 
fulfilled, and these conditions constitute our faith. 
This faith, it must be noted, is not something 
superadded or foreign to the work given us to 
do, but lies in its very heart. You look at a rose- 
bush in the spring and you see the buds swelling 
on the tips of the rosebush. Where is the beauty ? 
Wait till the bud opens ; beauty is in the heart 
of that rosebud, beauty is part of its being ; when 
you get the one you get the other. The bud will 
lead to the rose in bloom and then you will see 
the beauty. There is nothing said about faith in 



CHRISTIAN IDEAL AND ENDLESS LIFE 391 

these words of Jesus ; they simply call attention 
to our duty, endless, infinite ! But there is faith 
in its heart, and the faith is there as condition. 
Suppose you say that the duty of this old world 
of ours is to be living, beautiful, fruitful ; certain 
conditions are necessary. There must be a sun 
to flood it with light, that is one condition ; it 
must have the power to receive that vital force 
and to respond to it ; that is, its nature must be 
akin to the illuminating power. That is the sec- 
ond condition. And the third is, the old world 
must have time to live, time to grow beautiful, 
time to mature fruit, time to follow the sun. 
These three conditions are given in your demand 
that the earth be living and beautiful and fruit- 
ful. And so when you ask a man to do a great 
duty, you look into the heart of that duty and 
you find conditions : a God who sets his ideal ; a 
soul capable of receiving that ideal ; and time in 
which to serve the ideal and embody it. 

Look next at the economy of faith that goes 
with this task. As much faith as our work de- 
mands, no more faith than our work needs ; that 
is the law of these words of Jesus. When a 
steamer leaves port for the ocean, she takes the 
equipment for sailing, and no more. Business 
equipment is business equipment for success, and 
no more. The equipment of a government is 
equipment for efficient and beneficent adminis- 



392 BEV ELATION AND THE IDEAL 

tration, and no more. The equipment of an army- 
is equipment for fighting and victory. The equip- 
ment of a man in faith is equipment for his task ; 
as much faith as his task demands, no more faith 
than his work demands. Therefore, away with 
the overblown systems of opinion, away with the 
schemes of omniscience ; they are out of place 
because they are not needed. You are a servant 
and only such things as belong to a servant be- 
long to you, — a master to set your task, a soul 
fitted to receive that appointment, and time in 
which to do your master's will. Faith and the 
economy of faith are given in the given task. 

2. Observe, in the second place, that the 
greater the task the greater the conditions which 
it carries with it, and since these conditions are 
the faith, the greater the faith. If you set your 
servant to write for you a hundred letters, or to 
take account of stock, or to cross the continent 
and to do business for you on the Pacific slope, 
or to go round the world and visit in the interest 
of your firm the principal cities of the world ; — 
in each case you set the task, in each case a 
greater task, and in all justice in each case you 
allow a greater time. 

What is your vocation? Simply that of an 
animal. The ends of your animal life are soon 
accomplished ; let us eat and drink, for to-morrow 
we die. The animal in man is, however, only the 



CHRISTIAN IDEAL AND ENDLESS LIFE 393 

beginning. Your house has a foundation, but the 
foundation is not your house ; the superstructure 
is your house. You are an animal in the physi- 
cal basis of your life, but animalism is not you ; 
upon that animal basis there is erected a spiritual 
being ; that is, your moral personality. The tree 
is rooted in the earth, but rooted there to soar 
and at last to swell in buds and to burst into 
bloom and to issue in fruit. 

If a man conceives his vocation as simply that 
of an animal, he requires no faith. Animal ends 
are soon accomplished ; when you have accom- 
plished your work, the universe is done with you. 
If your work is simply to eat and to drink, then 
to-morrow you must die ; — you need no faith. 
Is your vocation simply to think, to know, to 
make images ; to form good, bad, or indifferent 
pictures ; to construct good, bad, or indifferent sys- 
tems of opinion, of the great, mysterious reality 
that we call the universe? Then your work is 
brief and slight ; it is of no permanent concern ; 
when your work is done, you may go your way, 
you are absolved. 

There is the log in the vortex, whirling round 
endlessly in the boiling torrent. That is animal 
life, subject to the laws of the cosmos, living by 
the poor thoughts of itself injected from beyond, 
governed from without, lasting as long as the 
wild laws that play upon it permit. There is the 



394 REVELATION AND THE IDEAL 

log that has been thrown by the vortex upon the 
river's bank. That is the life of the spectator ; 
he is no part of the current, no part of the boil- 
ing abyss ; he is landed, stranded, cast aside. The 
mere spectator counts for little in this ongoing, 
tremendously real universe ; his opinions are only 
of passing moment. 

Are you a servant, is service your vocation ? 
Then you count for more ; you are real ; you are 
parrt of reality; and as your work grows your 
significance grows. Is it a mile that you are to 
travel, or a hundred miles, or a thousand miles, 
or a million miles? In each case jou have a 
greater work, and in each case a greater condi- 
tion is attached. Is your journey an endless jour- 
ney; then the condition of it is endless time. 
Great issues require great time. Can you manu- 
facture a violin in a week ? Impossible ; age is 
essential. Other things being equal, the older 
the violin the better ; time gives it maturity and 
sweetness ; time puts quality, supreme excellence 
into it from the heart of the universe. You can 
duplicate a minster, but your duplicate will not 
be the original. That dark tower, weather-beaten, 
weather-stained, toned by time, glorified by a 
thousand years of human history, you cannot 
duplicate. The chicken tumbles out of the shell, 
and forthwith begins to care for itself ; a child 
is born helpless, and years must pass before it 



CHRISTIAN IDEAL AND ENDLESS LIFE 395 

can take care of its own life. The great issues 
require great time ; the more important a thing 
is, the more and the larger are the conditions 
that go with it. Is your task simply to climb a 
ridge ? — when your task is done, the universe is 
done with you ; you may die when you please ! 
Is it your duty to climb a hill? The task is 
greater but still brief, and when it is done you 
are absolved and may go your way ! Are you 
under orders to climb a Matterhorn ? That obli- 
gation is steep, it is difficult, it is heroic, but it 
is temporary, and when it is done, you are dis- 
charged ! The universe is done with the man 
whose work is done. Are you under bonds to 
climb forever the pathway of loving service, the 
height of obligation, the stairway of the moral 
universe? Is it your vocation to climb forever? 
Then life forever more is yours. 

3. Man's chief business in this world, let it 
be said, is with his duty, not with the conditions 
thereof ; God will take care of them. Herein we 
touch the source, the spring of our chief difficulty 
concerning immorality. Men begin to figure out 
the conditions without the vocation, the faith 
without the task. They iniagine that they can 
settle how long man is to exist by mere specula- 
tion, by the exercise of the intellect alone. It 
cannot be done. Every spool of thread has two 
ends, a right and a wrong. You take the wrong 



396 REVELATION AND THE IDEAL 

end, and it will ravel and puzzle and torment 
you all the way through. Take the right end, 
and the thread will run off to the last ream with 
perfect smoothness. There are two ends to the 
problem of life, the right end and the wrong. 
You try to think, to philosophize your moral 
personality and all the problems that inhere in 
it, into perfect clearness ; it cannot be done ; it 
cannot be done because the significance of your 
personality is to be a doer, a workman that 
needeth not to be ashamed. That is the right 
end of '"the thread ; deal with your duty ; attend 
to your task. 

I cannot tell you how great these words of Jesus 
seem to me to be ; how profound they appear ; 
how completely they answer to the deepest in 
life, to the constitution of the human soul and 
the constitution of the world. The problems of 
the soul are not to be settled in the study by 
those who have leisure to think, and by those 
alone. Jesus' concern was in the network of hu- 
man relations that make up the organism of 
our humanity. We are sons, brothers, fathers, 
friends, citizens, mechanics, merchants, doctors, 
significant human beings. We have our work ; 
through this temporal service we are in duty 
bound to do what the stars do every night. They 
look down from the infinite heights with their 
pure, glorious eyes, through the atmosphere of 



CHRISTIAN IDEAL AND ENDLESS LIFE 397 

our earth, down upon the wayfarer on street and 
on highway. And we, in this mesh and network 
of relations that make up the organism of our 
humanity, working as we are at perishable inter- 
ests, getting food and clothing and houses, con- 
ducting the production and the exchange of the 
world, — we are to look with starry eyes through 
all this order of time and sense in the strength 
of the order of eternal excellence which it is our 
business more and more to win. Is it not great 
to throw into the process of being, the great, 
sanguine process of existence, the meaning of 
man and to tell man to find there the solution 
of his problems? Find your work and then you 
will find your God; find your work and you will 
find how long you shall last. 

Let me recall you to this lost chord in the 
great harmony of life. Did we not strike that 
chord by accident, as it seemed, when we were 
sent out on our first errand of duty with a 
mother's blessing warm upon our brow ? In the 
first vision of love, when we thought of a home 
of our own, in the day on which we became par- 
ents, in the solemn prophetic hours of life, did 
we not all unconsciously strike that chord, beat 
out the music of that grand amen? Duty came 
from the soul of the universe and entered into 
ours; then we knew in one great moment that 
we belonged to God, that our existence was no 



398 REVELATION AND THE IDEAL 

mere incident of time. That lost chord is the 
tragedy of man's life, the lost conscience, the 
lost sense of a vocation in the service of the ideal. 
It is hopeless to look for a great faith till that 
lost vocation in the kingdom of love is found. 
The animal life needs no faith ; the whole circle 
of its wants is met in space and in time. The 
mere spectator needs no faith ; he is awakened 
by no heavenly vision shining in the eternal 
morning, and, therefore, stands in no essential 
relation to the infinite heart of things. 

The living world of man is our organ ; over 
this vast keyboard our fevered fingers wander; 
in our pain and sorrow we hope to come upon 
something great. We hope in vain till conscience 
shall preside at the organ. Then, indeed, we 
shall find the lost chord, shall find it never again 
to lose it while the sense of duty commands ex- 
istence ; then, too, we shall take the uncertainties 
out of the great song ; it must be that death's 
bright angel shall speak in that chord again, it 
must be that also in heaven we shall hear that 
grand amen. 

Not in the instinct of life for continued life, 
nor in the great impulse of the intellect after 
knowledge without limit, nor in the imperious 
demand of love that those whom it deems worthy 
to live forever shall be permitted to go on, nor 
in the cry of the heart for the consummation of 



CHEISTIAN IDEAL AND ENDLESS LIFE 399 

our poor human world in the triumph o£ the 
eternal, does Jesus find the deepest basis for his 
idea of the endless existence of the soul, but in 
the exaltation which comes through the service 
of an infinite ideal. The sureness of the endless 
life is in the conscience of the servant of the 
eternal ideal. Man's work is never done ; man's 
work is ever just begun ; therefore, days and 
years do not count ; therefore, all time is given 
for his endless and glorious task. 

The story of the Risen Lord meets the entire 
circle of man's nobler instincts, and on this ac- 
count he is in danger of missing the supreme 
motive in it. The Risen Lord meets the instinct 
of life, the craving for knowledge, the cry of love, 
the sorrow of the soul over the mystery and 
tragedy of human history and the hunger of the 
spirit after the eternal worth. These are the 
colors hidden in the heart of the pure white 
light of the Easter gospel. We receive the whole 
inspiration of this great faith as we have the 
right to receive it ; but we must not lose the 
sense of that which is central in it. The Risen 
Lord is the assurance that God is the perfect 
moral being ; that He has made man for likeness 
to Himself ; that man's career is to be in the 
service of an infinite moral ideal ; that as a ser- 
vant of the kingdom of love and worth his destiny 
is to live forever. 



400 REVELATION AND THE IDEAL 

The severest and the sublimest idea of duty is 
in the Lord's teaching concerning the life ever- 
lasting. In the summer we think only of the 
foliage of the tree abundant, beautiful, a vast 
and mystic ministry to the eye ; in winter when 
the tree is bare we note the structure of it, the 
form and symmetry that underlie and make pos- 
sible that rich dower of beauty. In the teaching 
of Jesus about the future, there is this twofold 
aspect ; there is the inexpressible consolation of 
it to the broken heart, and there is the revela- 
tion of the august moral order of the soul, set 
tiirough the service of an infinite moral ideal in 
the moral order of the universe. It is this sec- 
ond aspect that is the deeper. From the stern 
demand for the service of an infinite cause there 
comes the tender joy, the rich delight, the sum- 
mer bloom and abundance of the heart living in 
the sense of the endless life. The substructure 
concealed under this wealth of beautiful affec- 
tions and hopes is the Christian conscience an- 
swering the call of the Lord : " Ye shall be 
perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect." The 
tie between God and man, the present and the 
future, time and eternity, the living and the dead, 
is the Christian conscience. For the universe of 
rational beings God sets, in his own life, the in- 
finite ideal; in the pursuit and service of that 
ideal is the assurance of endless life; in the 



CHRISTIAN IDEAL AND ENDLESS LIFE 401 

pursuit and service of that ideal hearts draw 
together and become one there as they drew 
together and became one here. In the vision and 
service of the eternal ideal we hold our faith in 
the endless life and in the reunion of loving 
hearts beyond the grave. The Easter gospel, the 
triumph of the Lord over death, is the assurance 
that our faith is not vain. 

A burst of joy let Easter be, but a burst of 
joy from the heart of duty, the notes of triumph 
blown from the trumpet that calls anew to the 
sterner and closer service of an infinite ideal. 
The song of gladness from the lips of a servant 
in God's kingdom of love ; let that be our Easter. 
Let us be sure of our Christian ideal, sure of 
our service, and God will take care of the song 
of gladness. Soldiers of an infinite ideal are we, 
soldiers under the command of our Lord, the 
sovereign idealist ; let us be sure as soldiers that 
our vision is clear, that our hearts are true, that 
our struggle is brave and our devotion unto 
death. In this battle-field of time let us do our 
best by the Eternal Love, knowing well that the 
Eternal Love will do the best by us. 



XXX 

THE RECORD AND THE IDEAL 

"And the rest of my fellow workers, whose names are in the book of 
life." 

Phil. IV, 3. 

In a private collection of works of art in the city 
of Amsterdam, there may be seen one of the 
rarest of Dutch masterpieces by one of the most 
gifted of Dutch painters. The picture is the 
picture of Faust. The world outside is asleep ; 
it is midnight. Faust is in his study, and the 
great head and the fine face and the doctor's 
scarlet robe stand out with fascinating distinct- 
ness under the glare of the lamp. The room as 
a whole is dim, but one can see the thousands of 
books on the shelves lining the walls. One can 
see book after book on the floor; the desk is 
covered with them ; one book is open, and those 
great eyes are studying with intense and painful 
interest the contents of its pages. There the 
artist has drawn the student among his books, 
the student in vital relation to his books. What 
does that relation mean? It is the individual 
man, consulting the universal man, hoping from 
that consultation to gain insight into the mystery 
of human life. How powerfully and how beauti- 



THE RECORD AND THE IDEAL 403 

fully the masterpiece to which I have referred 
brings out that relation of the one intellect to the 
many, — the solitary, single-handed, isolated in- 
dividual, consulting the genius of his race ! 

What is a book? Letters, words, sentences, 
paragraphs, chapters, symbols set in order, with 
a beginning and a middle and an end ? A book 
is all that and infinitely more. Milton, one of 
the greatest readers of great books, has told us 
that a good book is the precious lifeblood of a 
master spirit. It is, then, the record of life. If 
we would understand the book, we must have ac- 
cess to the life and bring the light of the life to 
bear upon the record of it. This brings me to the 
text, to those beautiful words, as deep as they 
are beautiful : " The rest of my feUow workers, 
whose names are in the book of life." I think 
that these words have a message to the student 
and I would like to indicate briefly part of that 
message. Technically or untechnicaUy are we not 
all students ? Are we not inquirers, seekers after 
the truth, learners one from another, confessing the 
immeasurable scope of truth, and our own im- 
mediate poverty of faculty and knowledge, facing 
the infinite, hoping to add to the effective power 
of our knowledge by the study, the search, the 
learning of each day ? 

I think that mood is characteristic of the true 
man in college and out of it; it is characteristic 



404 REVELATION AND THE IDEAL 

of the true man everywhere. There is the confes- 
sion of a momentous reality beyond him ; there 
is the consciousness of some insight into it ; there 
is the third consciousness of inadequate knowl- 
edge and the desire to add to knowledge every 
day. This is the attitude of mind, believe me, of 
the man of the greatest learning as it is of the 
enthusiastic youth who knows that he has little 
learning. We are all together in this great and 
noble fellowship, seekers after truth, seekers after 
the meaning of life, sitting at the feet of the 
great, inquirers of the way through the valley, 
across the wilderness, over the mountains into 
the glow of the sunset that means our home. 

1. Guided by my text my first remark is that 
primacy belongs not to books, but to life. Take 
the greatest example of all, the Master of the 
Christian world. He wrote nothing ; He lived 
about three-and-thirty years in this world ; his 
public ministry was confined to a few years in 
which He spoke his message to the people of his 
country and his time. You must mark these three 
things in this order: first, the mighty life of 
Jesus, — that is the original thing; then the 
spoken word of the Lord ; and in the third place 
the record, the evangelical record that we call 
the Gospel, which came into existence many 
years after He left the world. 

If we are to understand the record we must go 



THE RECORD AND THE IDEAL 405 

to the speaker of whom it is the record ; visualize 
Him, his time, his place, his audience, and, as it 
were, hear the word spoken by Him to human 
souls. Then if we are to understand anything of 
this word, we must pass beyond it to the life 
of the Lord ; we must get at the quality of his 
being, the majesty of his mode of living, the 
tenderness and the sublimity of his soul. That is 
the order. 

The New Testament writings all came into 
existence in this way. No one ever thought of 
writimg a book. It never entered into the mind 
of Paul or Peter or John that they were to make 
books. The great thing was a divine life in that 
community reproduced, in the first instance, in 
the lives of the apostles ; reproduced, in the 
second place, in the lives of those whom the 
apostles had persuaded to become disciples of 
the Lord. This divine life called forth a record 
of things done. These apostles of the Lord had 
new thoughts, new insights, new interpretations 
of man's life, new interpretations of God, and 
God's world, and of all things. Thus a record 
was made of the Acts of the Apostles; thus 
great souls came to write their thoughts to cheer 
one another on. This church, that church, and 
the other church needed to be enlightened, 
comforted, guided, and inspired, and so these 
occasional, and as it seemed to their authors 



406 BEVELATION AND THE IDEAL 

ephemeral, productions came into being; they 
were all processions ont of life, they were all wit- 
nesses of the primacy of life. 

An illustration from the classical world of 
Greece may confirm this fact. Socrates, the 
founder of philosophy in the Western world, 
wrote nothing ; he despised writing ; he thought 
the written word was a poor, defenseless infant. 
He lived the intellectual and the good life his 
full seventy years of existence and passed on into 
the other world leaving nothing written. Then 
came Plato, who, in the so-called Socratic dia- 
logues, with consummate art, preserved the 
method, many of the thoughts and the image, the 
living image of his great master. If you are to 
understand these works of Plato, you must pass 
behind them into life. Look at our American 
literature, consider the " Essays " of Emerson ; 
they cannot be understood ^,part from the life 
of a Puritan community. Webster's " Reply to 
Hayne " means nothing unless you have a vision 
of the life of the nation at that time, discordant, 
almost belligerent. The finest words of Lincoln 
have a national life behind them. Whittier's 
war-songs are sung first in the heart of the Amer- 
ican people of the North. All literature — Greek, 
German, English, American — refers the student 
back to life. A book is first of all a witness of 
the book of life ; the primacy belongs to life. 



THE RECOED AND THE IDEAL 407 

2. Ill the second place, few men make books, 
even when you count in all the bad ones ; and 
when you count them out and reckon only the 
great ones, how very few make books. All good 
books help all men who consult them to make 
life. The Old Testament and the New Testament 
were produced by a few men, but all through 
the ages these Scriptures have helped countless 
multitudes to shape their human existence into 
greatness and power. Something like this might 
be said of the literatures that I have just named ; 
a few Greeks, a few Germans, a few English- 
men, a few Americans produced the books that 
we call great ; but these books will help us all, 
and the whole world, when we consult them, to 
make life. Few even among intellectual men 
to-day make books, but all intellectual men are 
enabled by books to shape life into something 
fine and great. The Pilgrim and the Puritan 
were made by the Bible. They made a few books 
that have an antiquarian interest, but by the 
power of the Book that shaped them they made 
the life of the state. Cromwell was made by the 
Bible and Cromwell remade England. You see 
that life produces the book, that life is beyond 
the book, that the book is a middle term between 
life creative and life receptive. 

3. This leads me to my final remark that the 
everlasting record is not in the book, but in the 



408 REVELATION AND THE IDEAL 

life. This upsets our calculations. If a man lias 
not written a book that will live, or has not been 
written into a book that will live, he concludes 
that it is all up with him as far as posterity goes. 
Think for a moment of the fallacy here. Books 
are transient ; books are doomed, every last one 
of them ; Homer, Sophocles, Dante, Shakespeare, 
the Bible itself, all are doomed. When time is 
done they are done. Many of you have been in 
the Poets' Corner in Westminster Abbey, and 
those of you who have been there cannot forget 
the effigy of Shakespeare with a scroll in his 
hand, and those tremendous words upon the scroll, 
all the more tremendous because you had passed 
on the way to the Abbey palaces and great 
monuments, witnesses of arrogant and enduring 
power. The scroll reads : — 

" The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces, 
The solemn temples, the great globe itself, 
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve. 
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, 
Leave not a rack behind." 

There is not a book in existence, not even the 
Bible, whose life extends beyond time. It is not 
so with that other book, the book of life. Millions 
of fathers and mothers die every year, pious. 
God-fearing, just, tender, true, leaving no record; 
as far as visible record goes, they are forgotten 
in a year except by their children and a few 



THE EECORD AND THE IDEAL 409 

friends ; but in the book of life, their power is 
permanent ; as long as the human soul lasts, their 
power lasts. Take physicians, men of consequence 
in the community, men working at the very 
sources of life, healers, friends, counselors, indis- 
pensable servants of humanity ; how many of the 
last generation of them are living records to-day? 
Few, few indeed ; their power survives in the 
book of life and will survive to the remotest gen- 
erations. 

In the nearly thirty years that I have served 
this church I have seen a whole generation go, 
men and women ; few of those who were most 
eminent are now remembered, and these only by 
a very limited number. What then? Are they 
effaced? No, their record is in the book of life. 
They put character, truth, honor, faith, worth 
into life, and while life lasts, they last. 

Look for a moment at the text and its beauty : 
" The rest of my fellow workers whose names 
are in the book of life " ; the whole apostolic age 
is forgotten as soon as death had claimed its 
members ; that is not all. These men had toiled 
for God, had fanned the flame on the altar of 
human faith and love, had served the best inter- 
ests of their day and generation, had put their 
power into the life of Europe, and it is there 
to-day. When a good man dies and wakes up in 
the other world conscious that he is a living and 



410 REVELATION AND THE IDEAL 

loving soul, with a character shaped in the image 
of his Master, with worth and power in it ; when 
he turns and looks down upon time and sees that 
his impression upon life lasts, that what he put 
into human hearts lasts, that the seeds that he 
sowed in the furrows of human souls are spring- 
ing up and bearing fruit, how insignificant will 
then appear to him mere literary fame ! May the 
good God deliver us from the worst of all hum- 
bugs, from supposing that they have an everlast- 
ing record whose names are written in print, and 
that their fortune is to be deplored whose names 
are found in no book, but whose power is in the 
blood and in the better life of mankind. 

The finest thing about Thomas Carlyle, I think, 
was his reverence for his peasant mother. The 
most potent influence exerted over him was by his 
mother. Young men and young women, finding 
your way into the world of thought, do not be 
ashamed to heed the admonition and to confess 
your obligation to the pious, wise, and good 
mother ! Let me read two or three words from 
a letter written to Carlyle by his mother when 
he was at Edinburgh University. She had an 
anxious eye upon his faith, as every good mother 
must when she thinks of her boy. Carlyle had 
replied to his mother that he was reading certain 
uncanny French writers. This troubled greatly 
the dear old Scotch soul. He had said that he 



THE RECORD AND THE IDEAL 411 

believed in God as much as our imperfect facul- 
ties allowed ; to this the mother rejoins : " Oh, 
my dear, dear son, I would pray for a blessing 
on your learning ; I beg you with all the feeling 
of an affectionate mother you would study the 
word of God which He lias graciously put into 
our hands. Oh, that it may powerfully reach our 
hearts that we may discern it in. its true light ! " 
Then comes this fine sentence : " God made man 
after his own image; therefore He behooved to 
be without any imperfect faculties. Beware, my 
dear son, of such thoughts ; let them not dwell 
on your mind. God forbid." Then comes the 
postscript, best of all : " Do make religion your 
great study, Tom ; if you repent it, I will bear 
the blame forever." The mother's soul was po- 
tent to the end in the soul of her son. 

The great thing behind the book and beyond 
the book is life with God in it ; life is the record 
of man, life in the living God. Never dream be- 
cause you do not write a book that your life is 
thrown away ; when you awake in God's pres- 
ence in the eternal world and know yourself a 
loving child of your Heavenly Father, know 
yourself as one who put heart and conscience 
into this time-world ; you will then see how im- 
measurably greater that is as a record than any 
book that man can write ; life is the record of 
the ideal for the livinjr God. 



412 BEV ELATION AND THE IDEAL 

These reflections modify many things in our 
ordinary thoughts concerning revelation. They 
bring us to see the essential greatness of the 
Bible. It is great as the witness of the life of 
God ; it is great as the witness that God has lived 
in the souls of men ; its chief value is as a sym- 
bol of life, God's and man's in God. If we use it 
wisely, we may commune with those in whom 
God dwelt. It is preceded by life, it will be suc- 
ceeded by life, and while it lasts it is wholly as 
the servant of life. The ideal of the soul is in 
the God of whom the Bible bears witness ; the 
ideal record for the ideal of the soul is not in 
a book, but in a man and the society of men. 
" The Word became flesh and dwelt among us, 
and we beheld his glory, glory as of the only 
begotten from the Father, full of grace and 
truth." 



XXXI 

THE KINGDOM OF THE IDEAL 

" The ELingdom of heaven is at hand." 

Matt. IV, 17. 

The kingdom of the ideal opens through many 
doors into the life of man. By the appeal of na- 
ture and of parental affection children are led 
through wonder into the kingdom of the ideal. 
Into the same world of splendor, youth, in each 
successive generation, is carried through the door 
of love. Manhood comes, and again through man- 
hood's vision exalted or sordid the kingdom of 
the ideal takes possession of the mind. Wealth, 
power, and pleasure, while they remained unat- 
tained, are phases of the desirable, and in a sense 
they are forms of the ideal ; learning, insight, 
and character are less attainments than ideals. 
The men who teU us that they have done with 
dreams, who assure us that they have turned 
their backs upon the illusions of youth, have 
surrendered, although they may not know it, to 
other forms of the ideal. They may soar where 
once they groveled, they may grovel where once 
they soared ; in either case they are pursuing the 
vision of good. When young they followed the 
gleam sunward ; now that manhood is here they 



414 BEVELATION AND THE IDEAL 

follow it swine-ward. Old age, when it revisits 
early years no less than when it dreams of heaven, 
is under the spell of the ideal. Imagination filled 
with the pictured passion of human hearts is the 
enchanting leader of the race. Because we are 
poor and want to be rich, mean and desire to be 
great, weak and long to be strong, sinful and 
yearn to be pure, without God and cry out for 
God, children of a day whose foundation is in 
the dust and crave the glory of going on, we 
spend our strength in the world of ideals. 

1. The kingdom of heaven is first of all the 
transformation of the ideal world of man, the 
force that purifies, corrects, and exalts that world. 
The kingdom of heaven is at once the supreme 
vision and the supreme reality. It is the image 
that reflects the highest desire, the loftiest passion 
of the soul ; it is the reflection in a resplendent 
imagination of the utmost moral longing of man. 
It is all this and infinitely more. The kingdom 
of heaven means that God seeks to conform our 
confused and vexed existence to his purpose as the 
architect seeks to lift the shapeless mass of ma- 
terial in the fallen building into the embodiment 
of his design. Thus, as we look at it from the 
human side, the kingdom of heaven is the splen- 
did imagination that reflects the utmost moral 
passion of the heart ; as we survey it from the 
divine side, the kingdom of heaven is God's 



THE KINGDOM OF THE IDEAL 415 

order for man and the society of man seeking en- 
trance through our highest dreams into human 
life. The pile of stones longs, let us say, to be 
built into a temple of beauty ; the architect with 
his plan seeks to meet that longing. The soul 
cries out for the dominion of the Eternal Love ; 
the Eternal Love moves to his dominion over 
man through the highest visions of man. 

The world as it is satisfies no man ; the actual 
condition of men is a source of pain and of pro- 
test ; human society as it stands is a contradic- 
tion of human expectation. Everywhere the ac- 
tual is condemned by the ideal. Lazarus laid at 
the gate and desiring to be fed by the crumbs 
that fall from the rich man's table must feel, 
righteous soul that he is, that society is full of 
injustice and inhumanity. Dives, clothed with 
purple and fine linen and faring sumptuously 
every day, must feel the want of human sym- 
pathy, the awful absence of genuine friendship, 
the terrible destitution of all high regard and all 
true love. Neither for the pauper nor for the mil- 
lionaire is the world a complete, or anything like 
a complete^ satisfaction. 

When we take a nearer view we are at first 
filled with dismay. We look into human homes 
and find so much selfishness, disrespect, loveless- 
ness, disappointment, and pain ; we look into hu- 
man society and we find so much mean ambition. 



416 REVELATION AND THE IDEAL 

hypocrisy, cruelty, and pettiness; we survey the 
world of trade and find so much suspicion, dis- 
trust, and strife. Capitalists are afraid of one 
another, and yet they combine because of the 
greater fear which they entertain against labor ; 
workmen distrust one another, and yet combine, 
and force one another to combine, because of 
the hard and cruel heart of capital. You con- 
sider political life and discover so little true 
patriotism in it, so much wild ambition and cor- 
ruption. You turn your observation upon the 
various professions. You see the quacks that 
prey upon the sickness and infirmity of man- 
kind; you behold the wretched lawyers that live 
upon the strife of men ; you note the journalists 
that find their ideal in the base instincts of the 
mob ; you observe the traders in cheap and foul 
literature ; you reflect upon the incompetent and 
the unworthy guides of the spirit ; you sweep all 
this terrible actual into your mind and you are 
filled with dismay, and you cry out : " Who shall 
deliver mankind from the body of this death ? " 
In your sorrow you begin to dream. You be- 
gin to dream of a personal soul whose intelli- 
gence is possessed by a vision of the truth, whose 
heart overflows with deep and pure desire, whose 
will is commanded by a great and righteous 
purpose. You think of a home founded wisely, 
founded reverently, dedicated to high ideals, high 



THE KINGDOM OF THE IDEAL 417 

service, full of sanctity and of peace. You think 
of trade where the employers are just, and where 
the workmen are honest. You dream of a public 
service where the men who stand there are pa- 
triots, serving with an eye single toward their 
country's good. You dream again of the profes- 
sions ; you dream of all physicians wise and hu- 
mane, of all lawyers forces for justice and peace, 
of all journalists creators of high public opinion, 
of all writers sources of illumination and inspira- 
tion, of all prophets of the human spirit compe- 
tent and worthy. 

Out of your sorrow and your dream together 
there come two things, — a great belief and a 
great endeavor. The belief is that the true order 
of human society exists, and that it never yet 
has been realized. The endeavor is the uprising 
of your whole soul in the service of your belief. 

In the Gospel the kingdom of God is Jesus' 
vision of the reign of the divine love in the hearts 
of men by their free and joyous consent, extend- 
ing from sea to sea and from the river unto the 
ends of the earth, from the rising of the sun to 
the going down of the same ; a vision that takes 
up into itself all the higher dreams and ideals of 
the best men and the noblest peoples in all ages 
of human history ; it is the consummation of the 
world's highest belief and endeavor. This teach- 
ing of the Lord is profound and yet easy of 



418 REVELATION AND THE IDEAL 

apprehension. As God reigns in natural law, 
in the procession of day and night, in the succes- 
sion of the seasons, in the ebb and flow of the 
tides, in the coming and going of the great con- 
stellations, in the balance and order of the stellar 
universe ; as God's authority is revealed in the 
laws that are declared to us by chemistry, physics, 
and biology, so we believe there should be the 
reign of God as Infinite Love in the hearts and 
consciences of men and by their free and joyous 
consent. 

The kingdom of the ideal rests not only in the 
human mind, but also in the will of God. It is 
the poetry through which shines the order of 
God for man. There is an order in the human 
body that we did not make, that we cannot un- 
make. We may abuse it, we may outrage it and 
suffer ; or we may recognize it, revere it, obey it, 
and rejoice ; but whether we honor or dishonor, 
disregard or obey it, that physical order abides 
as God's will. There is an order for the human 
intellect. Truth and error are not the same; 
facts and theories, realities and illusions are not 
the same. There is a law by which all men think 
when they do think ; in the exercise and under 
the domination of that law they must think if 
they think at all. There is such a thing as sane 
observation, sane experiment, sane reasoning, and 
sane judgment. There is a logic in the human 



THE KINGDOM OF THE IDEAL 419 

intelligence, and in that logic, in that law, in 
that order God waits. We may honor it and be- 
come wise men, we may trifle with it and become 
fools ; in either case the order remains and in it 
God resides. There is an order in the conscience 
of man. Right and wrong, fair and foul, just and 
unjust, base and blessed, moral confusion and 
moral law are not the same, and no words and no 
man can make them the same. The order is there ; 
we have nothing to do with the making of it, nor 
can we unmake it. We may dishonor it, and sink 
into the Inferno of Dante ; we may honor it, 
give it our most loyal love, and rise into Dante's 
Paradlso. " Whatsoever a man soweth, that 
shall he also reap " ; as inevitably as the coming 
of day and night, as inevitably as the retreat and 
advance of the tides, as sure as the coming and 
the going of the seasons, as absolutely irreversi- 
ble as the process of the suns, as inviolable as 
natural law is the moral order of our human 
world. 

2. The kingdom of heaven is at the same time 
man's sovereign cause and sovereign spirit. Good 
causes are essential to the moral being of men. 
When the welfare of the family, the education 
of children and youth, the conditions of labor, 
the sufferings of the poor, the character of the 
nation l)ecome causes engaging a multitude of 
minds, at once the conscience leaps into flame. 



420 BEVELATION AND THE IDEAL 

The world without good causes is the world 
without progress. The richer any community is 
in good causes the wider the scope of advance. 
When art and science and religion appear as 
causes essential to the higher development of hu- 
man life, when these causes become great forces 
in the service of men, they put a new face upon 
society and behind the face they create a new 
heart. 

Our genuine causes are simply the interests of 
men lifted into the imagination and devotion of 
wise servants. Our needs are many and urgent ; 
they reflect themselves in the thought of our 
time; they stir feeling and appeal to action. 
Thus there issues the world of human service in 
response to the world of human need. These in- 
terests and needs differ in intensity and value ; 
they all are urgent, but some of them are indis- 
pensably important. The essential and the inci- 
dental stand apart ; the great interests without 
which men cannot be men rise and shine like the 
stars in some mighty constellation like the blazing 
worlds that constitute Orion or the Bear. The 
sovereign interest is that which comprehends all 
the separate essential needs of human beings as 
space comprehends all worlds, as the force of 
gravity keeps all worlds to their appointed place 
and task. 

This cause that comprehends all other essen- 



THE KINGDOM OF THE IDEAL 421 

tial causes, that orders all in the passion for per- 
fection, is the kingdom of heaven, the kingdom 
of God. It is the ideal of perfected society, the 
vision of humanity adjusted to its environment, 
reconciled to itself, and under the dominion of 
the Eternal Love. The essential interests of so- 
ciety are the separate polished stones ; as they 
are brought together and fitted wisely, stone to 
stone, something new emerges, a building of God, 
a habitation of the Eternal Spirit. 

Here, then, is the vision of our sovereign 
cause. It is vast as the total need of our race ; 
it is great and beautiful as the perfected life of 
society. It appeals to the moral imagination as 
the greater aspects of nature appeal to feeling. 
There looms our cause in the great mountain 
ranges looking through mist and cloud and fire. 
There goes our cause in the waves and tides of 
the mighty sea ; there shines our cause in the 
multitudinousness and blazing unity of the starry 
sky ; there spreads our cause in the all-compre- 
hending beauty and mystery of space. 

The kingdom of heaven is within you ; there 
is the interior spirit answering to the cause. 
Here it must be said that men get their worth 
from their causes. Washington's strength and 
purity, Lincoln's patient tenderness, and Crom- 
well's greatness came from their respective 
causes. The whole capacity of the soul for worth 



422 REVELATION AND THE IDEAL 

is called forth in this way. Paul says, " For this 
cause I bow my knees unto the Father " ; Jesus 
says, " For this cause came I into the world." 
The cause is the reveille that sounds the whole 
compass of the heart, that calls into action its 
total power. Jesus is the product of his cause ; 
Paul is the issue of his Master's cause which he 
makes his own. All great characters have been 
born of great eauses. The glorious company of 
the apostles, the noble army of martyrs, the 
heroic succession of the prophets, the radiant 
band of devoted mothers, the splendid procession 
of great patriots, the clear-eyed and undiscour- 
aged reformers, the deep-hearted, unwearied and 
unweariable friends of mankind, all have risen 
up in light and splendor from their causes. The 
capacity for worth is all that the idle and unde- 
voted soul can possess ; the actual worth of the 
whole world is drawn from the heart of the cause 
that is served. That men may come to their best, 
God has given them the kingdom to serve ; that 
they may not fail of their reward, He gives them 
their utmost worth through their work for Him. 
The deepest law of the spirit is that men be- 
come like what they love. The horror of perver- 
sity is here that men in their wantonness are 
being conformed to base ends ; the tragedy of 
mistake is clearly seen when it appears that the 
soul in its mistaken love is approaching in char- 



THE KINGDOM OF THE IDEAL 423 

acter the hideous idol that has deceived it ; the 
glory of reasonable love shines in the swift proc- 
ess whereby the lover is assimilated to the loftier 
character of the beloved ; the saving grace in the 
Christian faith is revealed by the manner in which 
the love of Christ exalts the whole human being ; 
the divine nature of man is attested by his ca- 
pacity to love the Eternal Worth ; the divine life 
takes possession of man as he gives himself in 
love to the Infinite Loveliness. According to 
Plato the highest good is to become like God as 
far as that is possible for man ; and the possible 
is made actual through love. The supreme end 
of existence according to our Lord is to be like 
God ; "ye shall be perfect as your heavenly 
Father is perfect " ; and the way to that ineffable 
goal is through love. All highest thought of man 
works out its good for man through man's love 
for the Eternal Loveliness. The state of the 
heart is the reflection of the heart's object ; when 
the heart reflects Christ, its mood is worth and 
peace, as the lake is luminous and beautiful in 
whose depths the star shines. 

3. The hope of the kingdom of heaven as 
cause and as mood is in the will of God. Fear 
not, little flock, it is your Father's good pleasure 
to give you the Kingdom. The origin of the king- 
dom gives us the right to be optimists. Look at 
the operation of the kingdom of the ideal. Here 



424 REVELATION AND THE IDEAL 

is a man who in his life defies the divine order 
of his being ; the will of God continues to hold 
that order for him ; upon sensualist, drimkard, 
self-seeker, that order is forever pushed further 
and further ; he cannot eject it ; it torments him 
by its divine beauty. Look at that home seeking 
happiness in wild egoism, in disregard of social 
man and social justice. Is that home happy? 
The divine order of home is in its heart; that 
order searches it, judges it, condemns it, holds it 
under perpetual punishment. There is trade 
when every man's hand is against every other 
man's. Does that condition of the industrial 
world issue in happiness, in content ? There is 
another order proclaiming that man is needful to 
man, that man is the brother of man. Wherever 
you look you find that God's order will not vanish 
at the bidding of man's selfishness ; that man can- 
not stand absolved in the process of egoism ; that 
he cannot find happiness or the reahzation of his 
being in disregard of the divine purpose that 
lives in him, the veritable, indwelling God. 

This order that cannot be overthrown, that 
pushes on to ever greater authority through the 
sins and follies of man, gives us hope that it will 
prevail. You cannot drive God out of human 
life. You cannot undo his deity ; his sovereignty 
lies deep and permanent in man's being ; and He 
will torment man — individual, domestic, social, 



THE KINGDOM OF THE IDEAL 425 

national, racial man — till man lifts his vision 
to the divine order, till like the Prodigal he says, 
" I will arise and go to my Father." The deep- 
est thing in this world is not the evil will or the 
base desire or the inner shame or the confederate 
wickedness of mankind, but the sovereign will 
of God in the blood, bone, and tissue, in the in- 
telligence, feeling, conscience, and will of man- 
kind. The expulsion of the Deity from the context 
of human life is hopeless ; the triumph of God 
through the persuasions of his reign is a legiti- 
mate hope. 

The vision of the kingdom of the ideal is one 
of the supreme consolations of mankind. Look 
backward across the expanse of the weary cen- 
turies and behold men from age to age lifting 
up their hearts in the strength of the ideal. Abra- 
ham in the dim morning of history went out not 
knowing whither he went, seeking the city that 
" hath foundations, whose builder and maker is 
God." Moses, the leader. of a multitude of eman- 
cipated slaves, attains to the vision of an ideal 
nation, for forty years serves his people in the 
might of that vision, in the wildness and loneli- 
ness of the wilderness, and at last in the peace 
of the ideal goes home to God. The ilkistrious 
line of the prophets of Israel, living in the heart 
of the injustice and shame of their time, were 
sustained by the vision of the kingdom of the 



426 REVELATION AND THE IDEAL 

ideal ; they painted upon the canvas of the conv- 
ing years their vast and splendid dream of the 
King who should rule in righteousness and bring 
in an age of power and joy to mankind. Plato, 
sickened by the corruptions of Greek society, 
writes a book whose richness is one of the chief 
glories of history, a book that seeks to enshrine 
the vision of the Eternal Ideal. Paul becomes 
the heroic and happy servant of an empire that 
persecuted and that finally rewarded him with a 
criminal's death in the power of his heavenly 
vision. John, another Christian apostle, found 
the consolation of his heart in the loneliness and 
suffering of his age in the assurance of the Jeru- 
salem that he saw descending out of heaven. 
The author of the letter to the Hebrews, one of 
the greatest of compositions, looks through the 
whole passing history of his people to the king- 
dom that cannot be shaken and rests his soul 
there. Augustine, living when Rome was going 
to wreck under the burden of its corruption, 
writes his " City of God," consoling his heart in 
his sorrow with the consciousness of the divine 
and imperishable. These seers and prophets have 
been followed by a multitude that no man can 
number of earnest and aspiring souls. Of all 
who have lived for the highest and who have 
toiled that the best might come to pass in human 
society, we must say, " These all died in faith, 



THE KINGDOM OF THE IDEAL 427 

not having received the promises, but having 
seen them and greeted them from afar, and hav- 
ing confessed that they were strangers and pil- 
grims on the earth." Their pilgrimage was in 
the consolation of the kingdom of the ideal. 

Jesus consummates the desire and the ideal of 
the ages in his vision of the kingdom of heaven. 
He beholds a kingdom that has its origin in the 
will of God, that is supported by the will of God ; 
a kingdom that becomes our sovereign cause 
opening a way out of selfishness, providing re- 
lief and oblivion from wild egoism, calling us to 
share the glory of the Universal Good ; an ideal 
in whose splendor is gathered the scattered lights 
of all the earnest centuries, in whose presence 
we can think our best, achieve our utmost, live 
at our being's height, and die in heroism and 
hope^ 



THE END 



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